Wordrunner eChapbooks is a hybrid of online literary journal and chapbook collections. Their 55th issue is a fiction collection, available to read online or in Kindle edition: The Boy David: Island Tales & Talk of War, a brilliant rendering by Don J Taylor of troubled times in the Hebrides and Scottish highlands and during the first World War..
With the exception of the title story, these tales take place in the islands and highlands of Scotland where, in a remote hamlet, a grieving widow seeks peace of mind; a boy is disillusioned by his philandering, mostly absent, naval officer father; a villager is proud to serve in the Royal Observation Corps, protecting the UK against potential Russian attacks; a boy struggles to learn trigonometry while his stylish teacher flirts with his older sister, scandalizing their recently widowed father. In stark contrast to these island tales, “The Boy David,” an excerpt from the author’s unpublished novel Merely Players, takes place on the Western Front in 1916 France, where the Scottish “Boy David” unit (as in versus Goliath) adopts a starving, rascally and nameless French lad whom they call Davie.
Also available online are all previous Wordrunner eChapbooks publications: 28 fiction, 7 CNF/memoir, and 5 poetry collections, each by one author — plus 15 anthologies by multiple authors and 2 Micro-Prose issues.
Free submissions for their Micro-Prose Issue 3 will be open October 1-31.
