fiction

Beneath Albright__ office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day.

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

Nashville has always been competitive. My granddaddy called it the Hillbilly Babylon.

but in Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity, and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties; neither apprehending want himself, nor vexed with the endless complaints of his wife?

Laughter comes from living." I shrug, try to sound indifferent. "I've never really been alive before.

Under fun__ new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don__ want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or to present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you__ first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn__ any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers_ affection is as dust, lint.

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...

His smile is beautiful. It's the kind of smile that can take away all nervousness and tension in a room, no matter how big. I have no choice but to smile back.

Fix me," I commanded him. "This thing, what I've done- there's something wrong with me, Noah. Fix it."Noah's expression broke my heart as he brushed my hair from my face and skimmed the line of my neck. "I can't.""Why not?" I asked, my voice threatening to crack.Noah lifted both his hands to my face, and held it. "Because," he said, "you aren't broken.

She stared at the faded tile floor before her feet, but knew his every step around her small kitchen. When Martin touched the coffee cup patterned curtains he must assume she__ made, her fingers throbbed. When his eyes slid across the flowery aluminum water bottle at the table, her throat cracked with thirst.The radio clicked off.The silence of the room soaked up her raspy breaths, her pounding heart, her ache, and stirred them around the one man she ever longed for in a way that changes how you taste the world.Her desire swirled in a pulsing, betraying, blurry hook, and encouraged him to move closer.Martin obeyed.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

... instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

_ it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass _ by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

I wasn't writing home. I wasn't writing a death letter, either. I was writing a death journal, a piece of fiction meant for my family and my fiancee, Sara.

All the clues are there in front of us,hidden under a veil,we cannot get the clue by searching for,we have to search for the veil instead.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.

My new story collection won__ please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I__ have to move out and find another world to write about.