Mother Sighed With Exasperation. "look, There Aren't

There Can Be No More Thrilling Idea Of Intimacy That Connecting With Someone Through The Agency Of The Written Word. Here We Meet, On The Page, Naked And Unadorned: Shorn Of Class, Race, Gender, Sexual Identity, Age And Nationality. The Reader I Seek Is A Tautology, For He/she Is Simply Exactly The Person Who Wants To Read What I Have Written...

What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy Shorn Of The Messy Contingencies Of Human Existence - Gender, Race, Class Or Age. Those Moments Of Transcendence When We Exclaim "you Know Exactly What I Mean!" Depend For Much Of Their Force On The Anonymous Character Of The Intimacy Between Writer And Reader.

A Short Story Is A Shard, A Sliver, A Vignette. It's A Biopsy On The Human Condition But It Doesn't Have This Capacity To Think Autonomously For Itself.

If The Seventies Were Bulbous, And The Eighties Sharp, The Nineties Were Nothing But Bogus.

When George Vi - Displaying A Flair For Timing That Was Utterly Absent In His Lifetime - Upped And Died, The Way Was Clear For Her To Inhabit Her Logical Position As The Eminence Cerise, The Bolster Behind The Throne.