Four free reads on the Net: 4 short stories mentioned in Paperboy

After a month long break, free reads is back. I have been reading for the whole month since Christmas (honestly) but haven't had much time to impose any order on my reading choices this past month. 

The theme of this week's four free reads, which are all short stories, comes from Christopher Fowler's Paperboy, a delightful and moving memoir of growing up in the 60s and 70s in an England that anyone over 45ish will recognise instantly (if you have no idea what Spangles or a Mivvi are or who Peter Glaze was, then it's probably as good an introduction to your parents childhood as any, if they grew up in England).

Anyway, in one of the chapters, Fowler lists his favourite short stories and I thought it might be fun to track them down and see if you can read them anywhere on the internet.

I was successful with four of them:

The Cone by H G Wells

Leiningen versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson

The Fly by George Langelann

and the last, which is a bit of a cheat, as this isn't the story that he mentions but another one by the author Dino Buzzati

The Time Machine

If you want to keep it free, Christopher Fowler's book can be borrowed from the Haringey digital library (now I've finished it).

Also...

Entirely gratuitous picture from the National Archive photo stream of an anti-smoking poster from 1966 which shows some of the groovy consumer goods that every young man could aspire to if he cut out the gaspers ( something very few people saw the need to do back then in the days of Woodbines).