The Culture House. I always thought it was a mistake for Nicky to go and live at the Gow House.
I didn't mention it to anyone. What would I have said? The Interns (2007) Brothers and sisters, we, the interns, are united at last.
We stand shoulder to shoulder, our poorly-fitting new suits rubbing up against each other, causing static. But we don’t care, because soon the power structure will start to crumble. The end of our struggle is in sight! The Seraph and the Zambesi. You may have heard of Samuel Cramer, half poet, half journalist, who had to do with a dancer called the Fanfarlo.
But, as you will see, it doesn't matter if you have not. He was said to be going strong in Paris early in the nineteenth century, and when I met him in 1946 he was still going strong, but this time in a different way. The Not-Dead and the Saved. Read the remarkable short story that has now won both the BBC National Short Story and VS Pritchett awards, as first published in Prospect Image, above, by Jonathan Williams www.jonathanwilliams.co.uk On 7th December, Kate Clanchy’s “The Not-Dead and the Saved”—published in the December issue of Prospect, and now free to read on our website—was awarded the BBC National Short Story Award.
This is the second major award it has won this year, having already won the 2009 VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. The Good Cop: a short story by Magnus Mills. The first time he came into the room I thought he had a rather preoccupied look about him.
It was as if his mind was fully engaged in trying to solve some formidable problem, one that had been imposed upon him by powers beyond his control. He paid no attention to me, although I was the only person present, and instead paced around the floor, moving from one comer to the next, until eventually he arrived back at the door. This he opened, glancing briefly outside before closing it again. "All right," he said, finally breaking his silence. "I've only got a few minutes, but if we're quick we should be able to get all this settled before he comes back. " "Before who comes back? " Only then did he look directly into my face. "You're not going to be difficult, are you? " I said nothing. "Because if you're going to be difficult it makes things very difficult for me. " He continued gazing across at me, his whole face appealing to me to accept his offer. "Shouts a lot, doesn't he?
" Jennifer Egan To Do. The Maestro's Loss (2012) Goodbye, Mother by Hanif Kureishi - Short Story. If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse. This is what Harry's friend Gerald had said. The remark returned repeatedly to Harry, particularly that morning when he had so wearily and reluctantly got out of bed. It was the anniversary of his father's death. Whether it was seven or eight years, Harry didn't want to worry. He was to take mother to visit father's grave. Harry wondered if his children, accompanied perhaps by his wife Alexandra, would visit his grave. Harry's mother was not dead but she haunted him in two guises: from the past, and in the present. This morning it was as a living creature that he had to deal with her. He had been at home on his own for a week. David Mitchell: Muggins Here.
A proper mental Saturday it is, what with New Sue off with her hernia and the Lukes of Hazzard gone AWOL, so Muggins Here'll have to cover for everyone else's break.
Not New Sue and Beverly are still giving me the silent treatment 'cause I can't let them take the bank holiday off, but it's water off a duck's back by this point. By ten o'clock the queues are looping back, and it's like all Greenland's one of those swilling dreams you get with 'flu. Full of eyes, drilling into me. Philpotts can't get close enough to fire off a "What are half your team doing without their name-badges, Pearl? " Jennifer Egan To Do. Down to a Sunless Sea by Neil Gaiman. The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent.
All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion. It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things.
The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. Fiction: A Short History of Hairdressing. The story follows Gregory through haircuts at three different stages of his life.
[I] Gregory, without his mother, goes to the barber shop in the new suburb he has recently moved to. He wonders whether the tortures he is subjected to at barbers' hands are universal. He requests: "Short-back-and-sides-with-a-little-bit-off-the-top-please. ". The only other people in the shop are pensioners. Barbers hate boys because they pay less and don't tip. Another « Five Chapters. By A.L.
Kennedy They’d considered the child and kept themselves circumspect. For her sake they had been in love, but quietly. Angela had lost a father, she was only eight, she would need stability and to feel herself the centre of attention for a while. Lynne had been clear about this from the start — her daughter should be allowed time to adjust. Jesus, they all of them had to adjust. Barry Westcott, much-loved entertainer, goes to work one evening and then doesn’t bring himself home. He’d made a remarkably natural-looking corpse.
This being how Lynne moved from Barry Westcott’s wife to Barry Westcott’s widow — not even the tiniest interval left between the two for independent life. Angela has usually slept deeply and well. It had struck her as peculiar that the announcement had seemed definitive when it was coming from a slightly tarty redhead in a studio and yet she hadn’t found herself remotely credible when she’d tried to lay things out for Angela. Perhaps loved better than before. Sun by D.H. Lawrence. Story: Marina Warner’s ‘After the Fox’ Story: Marina Warner’s ‘After the Fox’ photo by Proper Dave Marina Warner is an internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic, novelist and short story writer.
Her publications include the novel The Leto Bundle, long listed for the Booker Prize, and short story collections Murderers I have Known and The Mermaids in the Basement. Read. Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories. David Nicholls Every Good Boy. "It's a piano! " The black lacquered monster loomed in the doorway, my father and Uncle Tony grinning from behind its immense bulk, red-faced from exertion and lunchtime pints.
"They were going to throw it away so I said we'd have it. " My mother looked as if she might cry. "Take it back, please, I'm begging you. " An exclusive short story by Booker-winner Hilary Mantel. Hilary Mantel: Comma. I can see Mary Joplin now, in the bushes crouching with her knees apart, her cotton frock stretched across her thighs. In the hottest summer (and this was it) Mary had a sniffle, and she would rub the tip of her upturned nose, meditatively, with the back of her hand, and inspect the glistening snail-trail that was left. We squatted, both of us, up to our ears in tickly grass: grass which, as midsummer passed, turned from tickly to scratchy and etched white lines, like the art of a primitive tribe, across our bare legs.
Sometimes we would rise together, as if pulled up by invisible strings. Parting the rough grass in swaths, we would push a little closer to where we knew we were going, and where we knew we should not go. Short story: Beyond The Pleasure Principle by Hari Kunzru. ". . . in this way the first instinct came into being, the instinct to return to the inanimate state . . . " [Freud SE xviii, 38] I first encountered Dr Quecksilber as I was walking in the Zentralfriedhof, the vast walled cemetery that lurks like an extra district in the southern suburbs of Vienna.
Holding two and a half million dead, its population is greater than the living city it borders, and the inhabitants are housed in considerable style. The Viennese treat death with the same formality as they do food, surrounding the brute experience with well-mannered rituals that squeeze from it every drop of what, after long reflection, one is finally forced to term pleasure.
Before_their_very_eyes_clare_wigfall.pdf (application/pdf Object) Hari Kunzru.