Paul Smethers

Paul Smethers, a former high school English teacher, is an Associate with the Adult Services Team at Main. His special interests are poetry, ghost stories, and the French Bourbon dynasty.

Latest Podcast Episodes

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"The Moonlit Road"

Tonight’s author, Ambrose Bierce, has a personal history almost as strange as any of his tales. In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared and was never seen or heard from again.
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"The Transferred Ghost"

Tonight’s story, “The Transferred Ghost” by Frank R. Stockton, is important in the history of ghost stories and the literature of haunting because it is so remarkably different from our modern conception of ghost stories as horror.

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"The Phantom Coach"

Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards, also known as Amelia B. Edwards, was an English novelist, journalist, traveler, and Egyptologist. Her literary successes included tonight’s ghost story The Phantom Coach," the novels Barbara's History and Lord Brackenbury, and the travelogue of Egypt, A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877).

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"A Lodging for the Night"

Robert Louis Stevenson, famed author of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, continues to provoke both hatred and idolatry, and there are now well over a hundred biographical books and essays on Stevenson and his work.

T

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"Hand in Glove"

Elizabeth Bowen was an Anglo-Irish author notable for her books about the lives of Irish landed Protestants, as well as her fiction about life in wartime London.

In 1930, Bowen became the first (and only) woman to inherit Bowen's Court, a historic country house near Kildorrery in County Cork, Ireland, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland.

Latest Blog Posts

This is a great collection for the ghost story neophyte or for the old hand at enjoying ghost stories.  The editors present a collection that includes both classic and new tales from established authors in the genre. In bringing these masterful tales back from the dead, Ghost Stories will enlighten and frighten both longtime fans and new readers of the genre.
I’m really a ghost story kind of guy, but the title of this book intrigued me:  Mystery Writers of America Presents VENGEANCE, edited by Lee Child.  I remembered really fun stories about vengeance from my high school teaching days—“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe sticking out most in my mind.
You know when you pick it up that a book whose writer has won the Nobel Prize in Literature is going to be an important read.  I picked up The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing because it piqued my curiosity. 
One cannot, I think, err when choosing to read one of Joyce Carol Oates’ anthologies of stories.    This volume, Haunted:  Tales of the Grotesque, is as good as any other at introducing the reader to one of the great anthologists and short fiction writers of the last century. Winner of several  O. Henry awards for her short fiction, Oates has also received the Rea Award for Achievement in the Short Story.  Oates clearly knows her way around the shadows and mists on the dark side of the imagination.