Book News ~ The Vanishing Hand by E. Lea Wilson

I said there were two books coming out soon, and here is the second one... The Vanishing Hand by E. Lea Wilson, originally published in 1893 and never republished. Copies of the first edition are, quite literally, as rare as hen's teeth. I thought for a time that I'd encountered three out there in the wild (including my own copy), but then I realised that I had seen the same one twice. 

And on the subject of rarity, I have managed to find only one story by Miss Wilson aside from the ones included in this volume, and there doesn't seem to be a surviving copy of it. I intend to go on with researching this author, so if you, dear readers, do ever come across anything written by this lady, I would be extremely grateful if you would drop me a line (via the contact page on the Nezu Press website). Ta! 

Anyway, here's the blurb, etc.:

The Vanishing Hand was published for private circulation in 1893, when its author, Emma Lea Wilson, was sixty-four years old. It contains the novelette ‘The Vanishing Hand’, the novella ‘A Clever Trick’, and the short story ‘An Authentic Story of a Dog’. The title story is a criminous tale about strange nocturnal goings on at isolated Crighton Manor. Young Alice Taylor thinks she’s seen a ghost when a hand appears at her bedroom door and then fades away before her very eyes, so she enlists the help of ‘Aunt Lucy’ to solve the mystery. ‘A Clever Trick’ is the story of two stepsisters who fall prey to a wicked plan hatched by a devious stepmother. And the third tale is about a stray dog, a true ‘cur of low degree’, who befriends the female narrator of the story in order to avoid being stoned. The tales are clever and entertaining… and they are made all the more interesting by the fact that the contents were in part true. A very limited number of copies of The Vanishing Hand were produced, only a few remain in existence, and it has never been republished. This new edition includes an 18-page biographical essay by Gina R. Collia: “E. Lea Wilson: ‘Eccentric Spinster and First-Rate Storyteller’ ”.

Published: 30 June 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-917113-11-3.
Case laminate hardback, 22.86mm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 146 pages.

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available. Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.

Book News ~ The Door Ajar by Virginia Milward

I am very pleased to announce that the next Nezu Press release (well, one of two) will be The Door Ajar by Virginia Milward, originally published in 1912 and never republished. Its author, Pearl (Virginia was a pseudonym, and she preferred Pearl to her actual Christian name, Margaret), had an unhappy life, and her stories were very much inspired by her own experiences. The Door Ajar was Pearl's only published collection of tales, and she appears to have given up writing entirely in 1920, despite the fact that she didn't die until 1968.

Here's the blurb, etc.:

The Door Ajar, a collection of seven short stories of the weird and uncanny by Virginia Milward, was first published by William Rider & Son, Limited, in the spring of 1912. Two of the tales are premonitory, and three of them involve haunted objects—a book from the time of plague, a silver box that witnessed the French Revolution, and a painting from fifteenth-century Florence—that reveal the tragic ends of those who once possessed them. The atmosphere in all of the stories is oppressive; the women in them are haunted, desperate, tortured, abandoned or exhausted, and the cause for their sad state is usually a man, for ‘where men go pain follows—pain and misery of mind.’ These are tales in which ‘woman suffers and the man sins, and the man shares all the sin, but not the suffering.’

This Nezu Press edition, the first republication of the collection since 1912, includes a 17-page biographical essay by Gina R. Collia that reveals the real identity of the author and paints a vivid picture of her troubled life: “ ‘I Have No Use for Men’: The Life of Pearl Rudkin.”

Published: 30 June 2025.
ISBN: 978-1-917113-10-6.
Case laminate hardback, 22.86mm x 15.24cm (6" x 9"), 136 pages.

I wrote a post about the stories in this collection a little time back, and you can read it by clicking here.

The book is available to pre-order from the Nezu Press store (please click here); global shipping is available. Alternatively, it will be available from the usual online retailers soon, and you can order it from bricks-and-mortar stores.