Eight Pieces for the Left Hand
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How to Stop Your Mother-in-Law from Drowning
Richard Beard
‘This is one of those stories about she and you. She is the mother-in-law. You are the man who duped her daughter, or the woman who ensnared her son.’
Benjamin Pell Versus the Rest of the World
Tim Adams
‘You hear Benjamin Pell long before you see him.’
Northanger Abbey
Martin Amis
Jane Austen’s novel ‘Northanger Abbey’ was published posthumously in 1818. Martin Amis adapted it for Miramax Pictures in 2001. The film has yet to be made. This is how it begins.
Early One Morning
Helen Simpson
‘He's the only person in the world who listens to me and does what I tell him (thought Zoe).’
Perchance to Pick One’s Nose
Jan Morris
‘Shame and regret are certainly not the same things: je ne regrette rien, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins.’
Never Againism
Philip Gourevitch
‘Anniversaries can have an importance—a power over us—that we do not control.’
The View from Yves Hill
William Boyd
‘What is the point of rising early? I congratulate myself if I'm out of bed before midday.’
Aspirers
Pankaj Mishra
‘Bollywood is part of what our culture has become. We are lying to ourselves all the time.’
Osama’s War
Wendell Steavenson
‘He, of course, had nothing to be frightened of; if he died as a mujahid he was going to a paradise heaven.’
Ecstasy
J. Robert Lennon
‘She lay there, her hand on her jeans in the place where she’d seen John’s head coming out of his mother.’
The Tailor of Gujarat
Amit Chaudhuri
‘He was desperate for the photograph to cease to exist: as if the man in the photo and he are competing for the same oxygen.’
When I Last Saw Him
Blake Morrison
‘When young, we were impatient with our parents: now we want to atone for our callowness, to take measure of them, to understand which parts of them live on in us.’
Pilgrim
Patricia Hampl
‘Real travel wants to be dangerous, wants to smoke out the truth of the Other—providing of course you get out alive.’
Making an Elephant
Graham Swift
‘The death of a father is, in most cases, an inevitable passage of life.’
The French Lieutenant’s Diary
John Fowles
‘It was really just one visual idea: a woman standing at the end of the Cobb and staring mysteriously out to sea.’
The Best Picture He Ever Saw
Ian Jack
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
Ian Jack recalls the missing buildings of his hometown, Farnworth.
The Enemy
Tessa Hadley
‘She relished the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases.‘
Rats
Maarten ’t Hart
‘Only as I watched the little tugboat disappear towards IJmuiden, just west of Amsterdam, did I begin to have doubts about what had been proposed to me.’
The Handbag Studio
Thomas Keneally
‘In Los Angeles in late October of 1980, I was feeling the strange, malign electricity the Santa Ana winds bring to the city.’
In Lana Turner’s Bedroom
Gaby Wood
‘It was because it was night-time and raining that I decided to drive up to Lana Turner's old house in Beverly Hills.’
Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes
Jonathan Lethem
‘Writing about Cassavetes feels like vocalese: putting lyrics to passages of jazz improvisation.’
Little Durga
Shampa Banerjee
‘I groaned inwardly when anybody mentioned Pather Panchali and my small part in it.’
Stay Up Late
Jim Lewis
‘She wanted to enjoy herself, she wanted to try, but she didn't know where to begin.’
Down in Front
Colson Whitehead
‘This is the part where we find our seats. Step on toes, suck in gut, make yourself flat as a movie screen.’
