But then, I’ve been married a long time.
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But then, I’ve been married a long time.
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1957. Her father was a professor of political science and her mother a speech therapist. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia. She has published four novels, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1996 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and she is a winner of the Whiting Prize and the Lila Wallace award. Her latest novel is Casebook.
More about the author →‘Staring out at the endless gray, Mary wrote a letter to her mother and told her she'd named the baby Jane, the name she'd years ago given her only doll.’
‘He took my left hand and banded a cleft rose petal over my third finger. I knew before looking in the book. ‘Marrying,’ he said. He’s so young, I was thinking.’
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
‘I have driven a car on acid, carried my mother drunk upstairs and slept with numerous men and one woman to no consequence.’
‘Thanks to what Chetan had published, he and his parents were in trouble, and he was exiled from India.’
Fiction by Karan Mahajan.
‘All of us connected by this kind of universal sunstroke.’
Fiction by José Ardila, translated by Lindsay Griffiths and Adrián Izquierdo.
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