Published in 1918, What Not was hastily withdrawn due to a number of potentially libellous pages, and was reissued in 1919, but had lost its momentum. Now republished for the first time with the suppressed pages reinstated, What Not is a lost classic of feminist protest at social engineering, and rage at media manipulation. Kitty Grammont and Nicholas Chester are in love. Kitty is certified as an A for breeding purposes, but politically ambitious Chester has been uncertificated, and may not marry. Kitty wields power as a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Brains, which makes these classifications, but does not have the freedom to marry who she wants. They ignore the restrictions, and carry on a discreet affair. But it isn’t discreet enough for the media: the popular press, determined to smash the brutal regime of the Ministry of Brains, has found out about Kitty and Chester, and scents an opportunity for a scandalous exposure. Aldous Huxley was a frequent guest at Macaulay’s flat while she was writing What Not. Fourteen years later, his Brave New World borrowed many of Macaulay’s ideas for Huxley’s own prophetic vision.

What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (Handheld Science Fiction Classics, 2)

Literature & Fiction

MACAULAY, Rose

Classics

Handheld Classics

Inez Holden’s novella Night Shift follows a largely working-class cast of characters for five night shifts in a factory that produces camera parts for war planes. It Was Different At The Time is Holden’s account of wartime life from April 1938 to August 1941, drawn from her own diary. This was intended to be a joint project written with her friend George Orwell (he was in the end too busy to contribute), and includes disguised appearances by notable literary figures of the period. The experiences recorded in It Was Different At The Time overlap in period and subject with Night Shift, setting up a vibrant dialogue between the two texts. Inez Holden (1903-1974) was a British writer and literary figure whose social and professional connections embraced most of London's literary and artistic life. She modelled for Augustus John, worked alongside Evelyn Waugh, and had close relationships with George Orwell, Stevie Smith, H G Wells, Cyril Connolly, and Anthony Powell. The introduction and notes are by Kristin Bluemel, Professor of English at Monmouth University, New Jersey.

Blitz Writing: Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time (Handheld World War 2 Classics, 1)

Biographies & Memoirs

Holden, Inez

Community & Culture

About the Author\nVonda N McIntyre’s most well-known novel is Dreamsnake (1978), which won the 1979 Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. She was a biologist by training, and the author of several Star Trek and Star Wars novels and many short stories. Her 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun was filmed in 2013 as The King’s Daughter. She died in 2019.\nUna McCormack is a British-Irish academic, scriptwriter and novelist. She is the author of The Baba Yaga (2015) and The Star of the Sea (2016), two books in the Weird Space series from UK science fiction publisher Abaddon Books. McCormack taught at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, as a lecturer in creative writing. She was also a co-director of the Anglia Ruskin University Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is best known as the author of numerous tie-in novels based on the science fiction TV series Star Trek and Doctor Who.\nThe first novel by the Hugo and Nebula award-winning novelist Vonda N McIntyre, The Exile Waiting introduces the world that McIntyre later made famous with her multi-award-winning Dreamsnake. 
In post-apocalyptic world in which Center, an enclosed domed city, is run by slave-owning families who control the planet’s resources and are strangling the city’s economy by their decadence, Mischa, a thirteen-year old sneak thief, is struggling to support her drug-addict elder brother Chris, and their predatory uncle who uses their telepathic link with their captive younger sister Gemmi to control them. The alien pseudosibs Subone and Subtwo have come to Earth to take over Center’s resources. Subone is attracted by the decadent living on offer and begins to unlink from his sibling’s conditioning. Subtwo has fallen unexpectedly in love with a slave. 
When Mischa defends Chris from Subone’s malice, Subtwo hunts her beneath Center’s foundations, and discovers how terrible Center’s cruelty has been to its inhabitants with genetically distorted bodies and minds. They have to rescue them and leave… but how?

The Exile Waiting (Handheld Science Fiction Classics, 3)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

MCINTYRE, Vonda N.

Science Fiction

About the Author Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) was born Mary Annette Beauchamp, and was an Australian-born British novelist. She married a German aristocrat and her best-known works are set in Germany. After her first husband's death, she had a three-year affair with the writer H. G. Wells, then later married Frank Russell, elder brother of the Nobel prize-winning writer and philosopher Bertrand Russell. She was a cousin of the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Her first marriage made her Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin and her second Elizabeth, Countess Russell. Though known in early life as May, publication of her first book introduced her to readers as Elizabeth, which she eventually became to her friends and finally even to her family. She is now known invariably as Elizabeth von Arnim. She lived in Nassenheide, Prussia, in London and in Switzerland. She died in the USA in 1941 while visiting her married daughter.Juliane Römhild is a lecturer at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and researches British and German interwar literature. She is particularly interested in women’s writing, middlebrow novels and representations of happiness in fiction. She is a founding member of the Elizabeth von Arnim Society. Her monograph Authorship & Femininity in the Novels of Elizabeth von Arnim (Fairleigh Dickinson UP) was published in 2014. Product Description A devastating and hilarious comedy about an Edwardian caravan holiday in KentIn the early years of the twentieth century, Baron Otto von Ottringel, a pompous and self-important major in the German army, is about to take a holiday abroad with his long-suffering second wife. His narrative of pained bewilderment at the bizarre behavior of the English people with whom he has chosen to spend a month in a convoy of horse-drawn holiday caravans is side-splittingly funny. We sympathize deeply with the lady whom he pursues in a platonic and very one-sided holiday affair, and even more with Baroness Edelgard, who discovers her own holiday freedoms, and becomes newly emancipated in her marriage, to the Baron’s horror. Reflecting frustration with and exasperated affection for German aristocratic society, The Caravaners reveals the lost world of European social networks and crusted assumptions that disappeared forever with the First World War.

The Caravaners (Handheld Comic Classics, 1)

Von Arnim, Elizabeth

Humor & Satire

With a cover endorsement by Neil Gaiman: ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of our finest writers. I’m thrilled that Handheld Press are bringing some of her uncollected fantasy stories back into print to delight and amaze a new generation.’ Following the success of Handheld Press’s republication of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fantasy collection Kingdoms of Elfin in October 2018, the remaining four Elfin stories are gathered together with the remarkable forgotten tales of The Cat’s Cradle Book (1940), eighty years after its first publication. This is a new selection of Warner’s remaining fantasy short stories, collected for a new generation of fantasy enthusiasts and Warner fans. The twenty-three stories in Of Cats and Elfins encompass scholarship (Warner’s ground-breaking essay from 1927 on modern Elfinology), black humour, the Gothic, and the bizarrely anthropomorphic cats of The Cat’s Cradle Book, which reflect Warner’s preoccupation with the dark forces at large in Europe in the later 1930s. The Cat’s Cradle opens with a story about the talking cats that die of a murrain in a manor based on Warner’s own Norfolk home with Valentine Ackland. ‘Bluebeard’s Daughter’ narrates the adventures of Bluebeard’s daughter by his third wife, and her propensity for locked doors. Warner mixes fables and myths with storytelling traditions old and new to express her unease with modern society, and its cruelties and injustices. Greer Gilman has written the Introduction. She is the author of Moonwise and Cloud &amp; Ashes, and two critically-acclaimed novellas about the poet Ben Jonson, as well as poetry and criticism. Her fantasy fiction has won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards.

Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies (Handheld Fantasy Classics, 4)

WARNER, SYLVIA TOWNSEND

Short Stories & Anthologies

This classic illustrated novel in letters sure to delight fans of Jane Austen and Winifred Watson. Hilary Fane is an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the mutterings of her surgeon fiancé. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings rapidly diminish, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman's (a very thin disguise for Selfridges), and rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernizing systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues. Business as Usual is charming, intelligent, heart-warming, funny, and entertaining. It's deeply interesting as a record of the history of shopping in the 1930s, and fascinating for its unflinching descriptions of social conditions, poverty and illegitimacy.

Business as Usual (Handheld Comic Classics, 2)

Oliver, Jane

For fans of the best-selling Women's Weird anthology comes British Weird, a new installment of stories by British writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that embrace the supernatural, horror, and the Gothic. Curated by James Machin, the author of Palgrave Gothic's Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880 - 1939, who details the background of these stories in the Weird tradition, identifying their use of peculiarly British preoccupations in supernatural short fiction. Immense church effigies walk at night, man find a prehistoric tribe in the Scottish Highlands, canoeing on a haunted river--these are some examples of Weird stories that are uniquely British in style and content. Authors include Edith Nesbit ("Man-Size in a Marble"), John Buchan ("No-Man's Land"), Algernon Blackwood ("The Willows"), E.F. Benson ("Caterpillars"), John Metcalfe ("The Bad Lands"), Eleanor Scott ("Randalls Round"), L.A. Lewis ("Lost Keep"), Arthur Machen ("N"), and Mary Butts "Mappa Mundi"). This collection is certain to thrill, entertain, and chill any fan of classic Weird fiction.

British Weird: Selected Short Fiction 1893 - 1937 (Handheld Weirds, 2)

Genre Fiction

Early Weird fiction embraces the supernatural, horror, science fiction, fantasy and the Gothic, and was explored with enthusiasm by many women writers in the United Kingdom and in the USA. Melissa Edmundson has brought together a compelling collection of the best Weird short stories by women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to thrill new readers and delight these authors’ fans. The thirteen authors include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, with her story of a haunted New England house, ‘The Giant Wistaria’ (1891); Edith Nesbit, best known for her children’s fiction by E Nesbit, her horror story ‘The Shadow’ (1910) is about the dangers of telling a ghost story after the excitement of a ball; Edith Wharton, the chronicler of New World societal fracture and change by new money tells an alarming story of Breton dogs and a jealous husband, ‘Kerfol’ (1916); May Sinclair, the Edwardian feminist novelist tells the story of ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’ (1927), about a love that will never, ever die; Mary Butts, modernist poet and novelist, wrote ‘With and Without Buttons’ (1938), a story of some very haunted gloves; and D K Broster, best known for her historical novels, tells an unholy story of a mistress’s feathery revenge, ‘Crouching At The Door’ (1942).

Women's Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 (Handheld Weirds, 1)

United States

About the Author\nRose Macaulay was a leading British literary figure of the 20th century, crossing genres and forms, and was made a Dame for services to literature in 1958, a few months before her death. She was born in Rugby in 1881, and was the second daughter of a family of seven children, with whom she lived in Italy for seven years during her childhood. On returning to Britain as an adolescent, she went to school and later university in Oxford, where she was awarded the equivalent of a degree in history in 1903. When Macaulay left Oxford to rejoin her family in rural Wales, she began to publish poetry, and then novels. In 1906, two months before her first novel was published, the family moved to Great Shelford, a village south of Cambridge, where her father taught English literature at Trinity College. In 1912 Macaulay’s sixth novel, The Lee Shore, won a Hodder & Stoughton literary prize of £600 (equivalent to over £50,000 or $70,000 in the present day), finally giving her financial independence. She moved to London in 1913. When the First World War broke out Macaulay volunteered as a VAD in a hospital for a few months but was much happier when she began working on the land. After nearly a year in the Women’s Land Army Macaulay succeeded in her application for an office job. She published the first pacifist novel in Britain in 1916, Non-Combatants and Others. From January 1917 she worked in the War Office on cases of exemption from military service and conscientious objectors. When the war ended Macaulay began to publish prolifically as a professional woman of letters. Her second volume of poetry came out in 1919. She published twenty-two books between 1919 and 1939: only half of these were novels, but at least one, Potterism (1920) was a best-seller. Her two most well-known novels would appear after the Second World War, during which, at the age of sixty, she was a volunteer ambulance driver. The World My Wilderness (1950) and The Towers of Trebizond (1956) would bring her widespread fame at a level that her earlier novels had not achieved.\nJessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. Her research concerns the relationships between narrative, culture and affect, and has addressed a range of women writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, Katherine Mansfield, Sarah Waters, and Pat Barker. Her most recent books include Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things (ed., with Patricia Juliana Smith, 2019) and Don’t Look Now (2017), a study of the cinematic adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s story.\nRose Macaulay’s anti-war writing collected in one fascinating and thought-provoking volume. 
Non-Combatants and Others (1916) is a classic of pacifist writing and was one of the first novels to be written and published in Britain during World War I that set out the moral and ideological arguments against war. Scathing and heart-breaking, it finds a way for pacifists to work for an end to conflict. 
Also included is some of Macaulay’s journalism for The Spectator, Time & Tide, The Listener and other magazines from the mid-1930s to the end of World War II, detailing the rise of fascism and the civilian response to the impending war. Witty, furious and despairing in turn, these forgotten magazine columns reveal new insights into how people find war and its tyrannies creeping up on them. These are supported by Macaulay’s two inter-war essays on pacifism and a short story narrating a devastating account of the loss of her flat and all her possessions in the Blitz. 
The Introduction is by Jessica Gildersleeve of the University of Southern Queensland.

Non-Combatants and Others: Writings Against War 1916-1945 (Handheld World War 2 Classics, 2)

Potterism: A Tragi-Farcical Tract (Handheld Defiants, 6)

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