Thanks to Tolstoy, everybody knows that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Maybe that's not quite the same as saying that unhappy families make the best stories? But one could make an argument for that, with Elizabeth Crane's We Only Know So Much. "At the moment, the
Reflecting a fictional timeline into the reader's world adds another layer of credibility to the tale. It's that much easier to imagine the characters in "Labor Day Dinner" taking shape, when you're reading it as Labour Day weekend approaches. Structurally, the story is complex, although at first glance it is
When actress Elizabeth Taylor was appearing in "National Velvet", novelist Elizabeth Taylor (nee Coles) was publishing her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's. It seems like everybody knows about Elizabeth Taylor the actress; Nicola Beauman's biography considers The Other Elizabeth Taylor. The biographer opens her work by explaining that she is
I wish that I could introduce the narrator of the last story, "Bardon Bus", to Prue. I like to imagine them sitting together in a cozy neighbourhood bar -- nothing fancy, rather the sort of bar to which people go to be heard rather than to be seen -- in
This is how it begins. "Sometimes in the long summer's evenings, which are so marked a part of our youth, Harriet and Vesey played hide-and-seek with the younger children, running across the tufted meadows, their shoes yellow with the pollen of buttercups." Both the novel, and the story of Harriet's
