Narrative Expert Gifts

'Unemployed doesn't look good on your resume. How about we say during that period you were a freelance writer?'

"Too bad about old Ainsworth. Published and published, but perished all the same."

"It's a heck of a tale...and well told, but we don't publish resumes."

News: Deaths! Deaths! Deaths!

"Max! Oh, my God! There's like a billion moving ideas in there!"

The ghosts of Christmas yet to come.

It was my story. A murder mystery. A who-done-it-and-got-away-with-it-until-he-wrote-about-it.

Grimm's Reality Tales.

Man commiting suicide finds the treasure at the bottom of the sea.

Atlas with the earth, says: 'So then I thought, Why not just roll the damn thing?'

"I see you're an ex televangelist who would like to stay in sales."

'Like it? I LOVED it! The narrative gripped me from the first sentence and didn't let go until the final, heart-stopping page! And the CHARACTERS! Without question, Harris, this is the finest year-end financial report you've ever written!'

"I'm after the history section."

'Mummy, the review of this book was more interesting.'

Man writing at laptop says: 'It's a UK road movie ??" to give it more scale, I'm making the characters three inches tall.'

My Aunt's Left Hook Expels Uriah From The Chaise

"It's a narrative I didn't intend."

"But you didn't say they had to make sense - you just told us to write a thousand words a day."

'He's narrating it, I just know it.'

"It's a coming-of-middle-age story."

The Truth

"Oh, you haven’t seen holiday drama ‘till you’ve met our little family."

"And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful eyes and great sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail a-thump when he heard his master's footsteps." Penny loved Daphne Du Maurier's 'Rebecca'.

"That's Eleanor. She's a fact checker."

“I’ve got an idea for a story: Gus and Ethel live on Long Island, on the North Shore. He works sixteen hours a day writing fiction. Ethel never goes out, never does anything except fix Gus sandwiches and in the end she becomes a nympho-lesbo-killer-whore. Here’s your sandwich”

'I hate these cliche situations!'

"Tell us again — a little less graphic."

History Department: 'I used to be a revisionist myself, you know!'

"What do you suppose Ken Burns will have to say about all this in 30 years?"

Ilyasah Shabazz

Toni Morrison

Reading room