Help! I’m Looking For Great Examples Of The Writer’s Voice…

[Jan L]

Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes:

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

Bradbury's Death is a Lonely Business:

There are some people who live to be thirty-five or forty, but because no one ever notices, their lives are candle-brief, invisible-small.

 

[CageSage]

Red Dirt Witch

A short story by N.K. Jemisin (in How Long ‘til Black Future Month?)

The way to tell the difference between dreams that were prophecy and dreams that were just wasted sleep was to wait and see if they came three times. Emmaline had her third dream about the White Lady on the coldest night ever recorded in Alabama history. This was actually very cold – ten degrees below zero, on a long dark January Sabbath when even the moon hid behind a veil of shadow.

 

[Serra K]

Two's Company, a short story in a collection called Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie

‘There’s someone headed the other way,’ muttered Shev, twisting her wrist and letting the dagger drop from her sleeve into her waiting palm. A fight was the last thing she ever wanted, but she’d reluctantly come to find there was no downside to having a good knife ready. It made a fine conversation point, if nothing else.

A figure started to form. At first just a shadow, shifting as the wind drove the fog in front of them. First a short man, then a tall one. Then a man with a rake over his shoulder. Then a half-naked man with a huge sword over his shoulder.

Shev squinted around Javre’s elbow, waiting for it to resolve itself into something that made better sense. It did not.

‘That is…unusual,’ said Javre.

‘Bloody North,’ muttered Shev. ‘Nothing up here would surprise me.’

The man stopped perhaps two strides off, smiling. But a smile more of madness than good humour. He wore trousers, thankfully, made of some ill-cured pelt, and boots with absurd fur tops. Otherwise he was bare, and his pale torso was knotted with muscle, criss-crossed with scars and beaded with dew. That sword looked even bigger close up, as if forged by an optimist for the use of giants. It was nearly as tall as its owner, and he was not short by any means, for he looked Javre more or less in the eye.

‘Someone’s compensating for something,’ muttered Shev, under her breath.

‘Greetings, ladies,’ said the man in a thick accent. ‘Lovely day.’

‘It’s fucking not,’ grumbled Shev.

‘Well, it’s all in how you look at it, isn’t it, though?’ He raised his brow expectantly, but when neither of them answered, continued. ‘I am Whirrun of Bligh. Some folk call me Cracknut Whirrun.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Shev.

He looked pleased. ‘You’ve heard of me, then?’

‘No. Where the hell’s Bligh?’

He winced. ‘Honestly, I couldn’t say.’

‘I am Javre,’ said Javre, puffing up her considerable chest. ‘Lioness of Hoskopp.’

Shev rolled her eyes. God – warriors, and their bloody titles, and their bloody introductions, and their bloody chest-puffing.

‘We are crossing this bridge.’

‘Ah! Me too!’

Shev ground her teeth. ‘What is this, a stating-the-obvious competition? We’ve met in the middle of it haven’t we?’

‘Yes.’ Whirrun heaved in a great breath through his nose and let it sigh happily away. ‘Yes, we have.’

‘That is quite a sword,’ said Javre.

‘It is the Father of Swords, and men have a hundred names for it. Dawn Razor. Grave Maker. Blood Harvest. Highest and Lowest. Scag-ang-Gaioc in the valley tongue which means the Splitting of the World, the Battle that was fought at the start of time and will be fought at its end. Some say it is God’s sword, fallen from the heavens.’

‘Huh,’ Javre held up the roughly sword-shaped bundle of rags she carried with her. ‘My sword was forged from a fallen star.’

‘It looks like a sword-shaped bundle of rags.’

 

[Rich.]

Ursula K Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, from ch. 4, [Amazon link]:

All night long the Summoner stayed on Roke Knoll, keeping watch. Nothing stirred there on the hillside where the stuff of the world had been torn open. No shadow came crawling through moonlight seeking the rent through which it might clamber back into its own domain. It had fled from Nemmerle, and from the mighty spell-walls that surround and protect Roke Island, but it was in the world now. In the world, somewhere, it hid. If Ged had died that night it might have tried to find the doorway he had opened and follow him into death’s realm, or slip back into whatever place it had come from; for this the Summoner waited on Roke Knoll. But Ged lived.

They had laid him abed in the healing-chamber, and the Master Herbal tended the wounds he had on his face and throat and shoulder. They were deep, ragged, and evil wounds. The black blood in them would not stanch, welling out even under the charms and the cobweb-wrapped perriot leaves laid upon them. Ged lay blind and dumb in fever like a stick in a slow fire, and there was no spell to cool what burned him.

 

[Hannah F]

My second offering, and I find it interesting that when I read this my mind immediately went to two pieces of humor:

On Wednesday night it had rained very heavily, the lane was wet and muddy, but the Thursday morning sun was bright and clear as it shone on Arthur Dent's house for what was to be the last time.

It hadn't properly registered yet with Arthur that the counsel wanted to knock it down and build a bypass, instead.

At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He work up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Opps, forgot to tag it: D. Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, though probably no tag was needed.

I wonder was this the inspiration for the Pixar film, UP.

 

[RK Wallis]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities (AmazonClassics Edition) eBook : Dickens, Charles: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store

A Tale of Two Cities (AmazonClassics Edition) eBook : Dickens, Charles: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store

www.amazon.com.au

 

[Claire G]

I’m midway through preparing the next major Litopia seminar, and it’s the most challenging – and probably the most important – topic I’ve ever addressed.

And I really need your help.

“The Writer’s Voice” is a cornerstone subject. Yet very widely misunderstood. The most common confusion (and I’ve found this on a great many writing advice websites) is that “voice = style”. It doesn’t.

What I’d like from you, please, are specimens of what you consider to be outstanding examples of the writer’s voice in action.

No more than 500 words or so. With attribution and links (e.g. Amazon) if possible.

How to do this?

Well, I suggest you start by reflecting on those writers who come to mind when you think about authors who have touched your life in some way. The books you may have first encountered years, or even decades, ago and which still stay with you.

The author’s voice that still speaks clearly and directly to you. Person to person communication; across the gulf of years, continents, race, class or gender.

Then narrow it down by choosing a few hundred words that seem, to you, to typify how that author speaks to you… and post below.

Thank you

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old — as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once — the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

 

[Claire G]

I’m midway through preparing the next major Litopia seminar, and it’s the most challenging – and probably the most important – topic I’ve ever addressed.

And I really need your help.

“The Writer’s Voice” is a cornerstone subject. Yet very widely misunderstood. The most common confusion (and I’ve found this on a great many writing advice websites) is that “voice = style”. It doesn’t.

What I’d like from you, please, are specimens of what you consider to be outstanding examples of the writer’s voice in action.

No more than 500 words or so. With attribution and links (e.g. Amazon) if possible.

How to do this?

Well, I suggest you start by reflecting on those writers who come to mind when you think about authors who have touched your life in some way. The books you may have first encountered years, or even decades, ago and which still stay with you.

The author’s voice that still speaks clearly and directly to you. Person to person communication; across the gulf of years, continents, race, class or gender.

Then narrow it down by choosing a few hundred words that seem, to you, to typify how that author speaks to you… and post below.

Thank you

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

1984 - George Orwell

 

[Claire G]

I’m midway through preparing the next major Litopia seminar, and it’s the most challenging – and probably the most important – topic I’ve ever addressed.

And I really need your help.

“The Writer’s Voice” is a cornerstone subject. Yet very widely misunderstood. The most common confusion (and I’ve found this on a great many writing advice websites) is that “voice = style”. It doesn’t.

What I’d like from you, please, are specimens of what you consider to be outstanding examples of the writer’s voice in action.

No more than 500 words or so. With attribution and links (e.g. Amazon) if possible.

How to do this?

Well, I suggest you start by reflecting on those writers who come to mind when you think about authors who have touched your life in some way. The books you may have first encountered years, or even decades, ago and which still stay with you.

The author’s voice that still speaks clearly and directly to you. Person to person communication; across the gulf of years, continents, race, class or gender.

Then narrow it down by choosing a few hundred words that seem, to you, to typify how that author speaks to you… and post below.

Thank you

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

"And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room."

Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

 

[Mel L]

There are so many wonderful examples already. But I can't resist sharing the opening lines of one of my personal favourites:

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Contemporary fiction. https://www.waterstones.com/book/a-...john-kennedy-toole/walker-percy/9780141182865

He had me at 'ear flaps'.

 

[CarolMS]

Janet Fitch's White Oleander, which inspired me to write my story as a novel. I feel there is a sensual quality to her writing, and an invitation to read between the lines and go deep into the characters' interior with subtlety and nuance. I think there is a blend of style and voice in this opening page to her first novel, and the lens through which she sees the world is emotion.
Amazon product ASIN 0316284955
THE SANTA ANAS blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whispers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.

"Oleander time," she said. "Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind." She held up her large hand and spread the fingers, let the desert dryness lick through. My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her. I wished that things were back the way they had been, that Barry was still here, that the wind would stop blowing.

"You should get some sleep," I offered."

"I never sleep," she said.

I sat next to her, and we stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand. The edge of her kimono flapped open in the wind and I could see her breast, low and full. Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.

I rested my head on her leg. She smelled like violets. "We are the wands," she said. "We strive for beauty and balance, the sensual over the sentimental."

"The wands," I repeated. I wanted her to know I was listening. Our tarot suit, the wands. She used to lay out the wands for me, explain the suits: wands and coins, cups and swords, but she had stopped reading them. She didn't want to know the future anymore.

"We received our coloring from Norsemen," she said. "Hairy savages who hacked their gods to pieces and hung the flesh from trees. We are the ones who sacked Rome. Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are."

"I promise," I said.


Down below us in the streets of Hollywood, sirens wined and sawed along my nerves. In the Santa Anas, eucalyptus trees burst into flames like giant candles, and oilfat chapparal hillsides went up in a rush, flushing starved coyotes and deer down onto Franklin Avenue.

She lifted her face to the singed moon, bathing in its glowering beams. "Raven's-eye moon."

"Baby-faced moon," I countered, my head on her knee.

She softly stroked my hair. "It's a traitor's moon."

 

[AgentPete]

I do hope so Pete, because up to now, as far as I am aware, no-one has ever explained what voice is. The closest offering is "I know it when I see it". To me that is not enough. I'd like the explanation to go a step further, if that is at all possible.

That's what I'm tackling head-on, Eva. It won’t be as prescriptive as, say, the Blurb seminar. But if I succeed, it will give you not only insight into “What is Voice?” but also help you to connect very directly into your own… voices...

 

[AgentPete]

“Happiness we can only find in ourselves, it is a waste of time to seek for it from others, few have any to spare. Sorrow we have to bear alone as best we can, it is not fair to try to shift it on others, be they men or women. We have to fight our own battles and strike as hard as we can, born fighters as we are.”


― Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele

Bought it and read it there

 

[Rich.]

And -- because, why not? -- an example from nonfiction: the unmistakably rambunctious prose of popular historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with his actor namesake who plays Spiderman).

Tom Holland,  Dominion, first page of the preface, [Amazon link].

Some three or four decades before the birth of Christ, Rome’s first heated swimming pool was built on the Esquiline Hill. The location, just outside the city’s ancient walls, was a prime one. In time, it would become a showcase for some of the wealthiest people in the world: an immense expanse of luxury villas and parks. But there was a reason why the land beyond the Esquiline Gate had been left undeveloped for so long. For many centuries, from the very earliest days of Rome, it had been a place of the dead. When labourers first began work on the swimming pool, a corpse-stench still hung in the air. A ditch, once part of the city’s venerable defensive system, was littered with the carcasses of those too poor to be laid to rest in tombs. Here was where dead slaves, ‘once they had been slung out from their narrow cells’, were dumped. Vultures, flocking in such numbers that they were known as ‘the birds of the Esquiline’, picked the bodies clean. Nowhere else in Rome was the process of gentrification quite so dramatic. The marble fittings, the tinkling fountains, the perfumed flower beds: all were raised on the backs of the dead.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Torak woke with a jolt from a sleep he'd never meant to have.
The fire had burned low. He crouched in the fragile shell of light and peered into the looming blackness of the Forest. He couldn't see anything. Couldn't hear anything. Had it come back? Was it out there now watching him with its hot murderous eyes?
He felt hollow and cold. He knew that he badly needed food and that his arm hurt and his eyes were scratchy with redness but he couldn't really feel it. All night he'd guarded the wreck of the spruce bough shelter and watched his father bleed. How could this be happening?
Wolf Brother
Michelle Paver
Voice to me means it can be imitated-but never recreated.
This one because I tried to recreate the power of its simplicity, but it came out a different voice. Mine.

“The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." -Hector Barbossa​

 

[Pamela Jo]

Vadinho, Dona Flor's first husband, died one Sunday of Carnival in the morning when, dressed up like a Bahaian woman, he was dancing the samba with the greatest enthusiasm, in the Dois de Julio Square not far from his house. He did not belong to the group-he had just joined it, in the company of four of his friends all masquerading as bahaianas, and they had come from a bar on Cabeca where the whiskey flowed like water at the expense of Moyes Alves, cacao planter. rich and open-handed.
The group was accompanied by a small, well-rehearsed orchestra of guitars and flutes: the four-string guitar was played by Carlinhos Mascarenhas, a tall skinny character famous in the whorehouses-ah a divine player. The men were got up as Gypsies and the girls as Hungarian or Romanian peasants; never however had a Hungarian or Romanian or even a Bulgarian or Slovak swung her hips the way they did, those brown girls in the flower of their youth and coquetry.
Dona Flor and her two Husbands
Jorge Amado

I think to understand voice you need to talk to translators. They have such a responsibility to be able to carry it into another language. Maybe there have been cases where like with Jerry Lewis, the popularity of a voice has more to do with the translator than the original, but I select books on how successful they are in other languages. If it is an international bestseller then there usually is something ineffable there that makes an enjoyable read. Jorge Amado has a prologue, and even begins with a note to the author from the main character-and it all works. By this paragraph the reader's appetite has been whetted, the place and characters created.

 

[Pamela Jo]

La Marche avec Mystery
Sunday August 23rd
My Bedroom
Raining
10:am
Dad has Uncle Eddie round so naturally they had to come and nose around and see what I was up to. If Uncle Eddie (who is as bald as a coot-two coots, in fact) says to me one more time , "Should bald heads be buttered?" I may kill myself. He doesnt seem to realise I am no longer in romper-suits. I feel like yelling at him. "I am fourteen years old, Uncle Eddie! I am bursting with womanhood. I wear a bra. OK, it's a bit on the loose side and does ride up my neck if I run for the bus... but the womanly potential is there, you bald coot!"
Talking of breasts I'm worried I may end up like the rest of the women in my family, with just the one bust, like a sort of shelf affair. Mum can balance things on hers when her hands are full-at parties and so on, she can have a sandwich and drink and save a snack for later by putting it on her shelf. It's very unattractive. I would like a proper amount of breastiness but not go too far with it.

Angus, thongs, and full-frontal snogging
Louise Rennison
Far funnier than, The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole and a voice you could pick out in a stadium full of Taylor Swift fans,.

 

[Eva Ulian]

That's what I'm tackling head-on, Eva. It won’t be as prescriptive as, say, the Blurb seminar. But if I succeed, it will give you not only insight into “What is Voice?” but also help you to connect very directly into your own… voices...

Sound wondrous, Pete.

 

[Eva Ulian]

There was a welcome, there. The clock struck twelve as she kissed me, and I stood among the stunning and striking like a prince taking off his disguise. One minute I was small and cold, skulking dead-scared down a black passage in my stiff, best suit, with my hollow belly thumping and my heart like a time bomb, clutching my grammar school cap, unfamiliar to myself, a snub-nosed story-teller lost in his own adventures and longing to be home; the next I was a royal nephew in smart town clothes, embraced and welcomed, standing in the snug centre of my stories and listening to the clock announcing me. She hurried me to the seat in the side of the cavernous fireplace and took off my shoes. The bright lamps and ceremonial gongs blazed and rang for me.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog - Dylan Thomas

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog

 

[Eva Ulian]

“They want me in Lime Street on Monday week, mother,” he cried, his eyes blazing as he read the letter. Mrs Morel felt everything go silent inside her. He read the letter: “’And will you reply by Thursday whether you accept. Yours faithfully - -‘ They want me, mother, at a hundred and twenty a year, and don’t even ask to see me. Didn’t I tell you I could do it! Think of me in London! And I can give you twenty pounds a year, mater. We s’ll all be rolling in money.”

“We shall my son,” she answered sadly.

It never occurred to him that she might be more hurt at his going away than glad of his success. Indeed, as the days drew near for his departure, her heart began to close and grow dreary with despair. She loved him so much! More than that, she hoped in him so much. Almost she lived by him. She liked to do things for him: she liked to put a cup for his tea and iron his collars, of which he was so proud. It was a joy to her to have him proud of his collars. There was no laundry. So she used to rub away at them with her little convex iron, to polish them, till they shone from the sheer pressure of her arm. Now she would not do it for him. Now he was going away. She felt almost as if he were going as well out of her heart. He did not seem to leave her inhabited with himself. That was the grief and the pain to her. He took nearly all himself away.

Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence

sons and lovers dh lawrence pdf - Google Search

 

[Eva Ulian]

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Macbeth – William Shakespeare

Macbeth - Entire Play | Folger Shakespeare Library

 

[Eva Ulian]

“Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,’ he said.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”

“Well – “ he said.

“You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”

“It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

“you can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.

“I don’t believe that,” he answered.

Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence

https://www.planetpublish.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Women_in_Love_NT.pdf

 

[Chris Yugay]

"Pappachi had been an Imperial Entomologist at the Pusa Institute. [...] His life’s greatest setback was not having had the moth that be had discovered named after him.

It fell into his drink one evening while he was sitting in the verandah of a rest house after a long day in the field. As he picked it out he noticed its unusually dense dorsal tufts. He took a closer look. With growing excitement he mounted it, measured it and the next morning placed it in the sun for a few hours for the alcohol to evaporate. Then he caught the first train back to Delhi. To taxonomic attention and, he hoped, fame. After six unbearable months of anxiety, to Pappachi’s intense disappointment he was told that his moth had finally been identified as a slightly unusual race of a well-known species that belonged to the tropical family Lymantriidae.

The real blow came twelve years later, when, as a consequence of a radical taxonomic reshuffle, lepidopterists decided that Pappachi’s moth was in fact a separate species and genus hitherto unknown to science. By then, of course, Pappachi had retired and moved to Ayemenem. It was too late for him to assert his claim to the discovery. His moth was named after the Acting Director of the Department of Entomology, a junior officer whom Pappachi had always disliked.

In the years to come, even though he had been ill-humored long before he discovered the moth, Pappachi’s Moth was held responsible for his black moods and sudden bouts of temper. Its pernicious ghost—gray, furry and with unusually dense dorsal tufts— haunted every house that he ever lived in. It tormented him and his children and his children’s children.

Until the day he died, even in the stifling Ayemenem heat, every single day Pappachi wore a well-pressed three-piece suit and his gold pocket watch. On his dressing table, next to his cologne and silver hairbrush, he kept a picture—of himself as a young man, with his hair slicked down, taken in a photographer’s studio in Vienna, where he had done the six-month diploma course that had qualified him to apply for the post of Imperial Entomologist. It was during those few months they spent in Vienna that Mammachi took her first lessons on the violin. The lessons were abruptly discontinued when Mammachi’s teacher Launsky-Tieffenthal made the mistake of telling Pappachi that his wife was exceptionally talented and, in his opinion, potentially concert class."

Arundhati Roy "The God of Small Things"

 

[Pamela Jo]

I first met him in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It was almost day-break and raining. A strong sirocco was blowing the spray from the waves as far as the little cafe whose glass doors were shut. The cafe reeked of brewing sage and human beings whose breath steamed the windows because of the cold outside. Five or six seamen , who had spent the night there, muffled in their brown goatskin reefer-jackets, were drinking coffee or sage and gazing out the misty windows at the sea. The fish, dazed by the blows of the raging waters, had taken refuge in the depths, where they were waiting until calm was restored above. The fishermen crowding in the cafes were also waiting for the end of the storm, when the fish reassured, would rise to the surface after the bait. Soles, hogfish and skate were returning from their nocturnal expeditions. Day was now breaking.

Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis

 

[MattScho]

You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.

DEAR GOD,

I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is
happening to me.

Last spring after little Lucious come I heard them fussing. He was pulling on her arm. She say It too soon, Fonso, I ain’t
well. Finally he leave her alone. A week go by, he pulling on her arm again. She say Naw, I ain’t gonna. Can’t you see I’m
already half dead, an all of these children.

She went to visit her sister doctor over Macon. Left me to see after the others. He never had a kine word to say to me.
Just say You gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t. First he put his thing up gainst my hip and sort of wiggle it around.
Then he grab hold my titties. Then he push his thing inside my pussy. When that hurt, I cry. He start to choke me, saying
You better shut up and git used to it.
But I don’t never git used to it. And now I feels sick every time I be the one to cook. My mama she fuss at me an look at
me. She happy, cause he good to her now. But too sick to last long.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

The color purple, presented in the color blue...

 

[Rachael Burnett]

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo and meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train.

When Moses sit down and pay his fare he take out a white handkerchief and blow his nose. The handkerchief turn black and Moses watch it and curse the fog. He wasn't in a good mood and the fog wasn't doing anything to help the situation. He had was to get up from a nice warm bed and dress and come out in this nasty weather to go and meet a fellar that he didn't even know. That was the hurtful part of it - is not as if this fellar is his brother or cousin or even friend; he don't know the man from Adam. But he get a letter from a friend in Trinidad who say that this fellar coming by SS Hildebrand, and if he could please meet him at the station in London, and help him until he get settled.

The Lonely Londoners
Sam Selvon

 

[Rachael Burnett]

Epigraph
Today I see it still-
Dry, wire-thin in sun and dust of the dry months-
Headstone on tiny debris of passionate courage.
-Chinua Achebe
From 'Mango Seedling' in Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems

Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair. Ugwu’s aunty said this in a low voice as they walked on the path. ‘But he is a good man,’ she added. ‘And as long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day.’ She stopped to spit; the saliva left her mouth with a sucking sound and landed on the grass.

Ugwu did not believe that anybody, not even this master he was going to live with, ate meat every day. He did not disagree with his aunty, though, because he was too choked with expectation, too busy imagining his new life away from the village. They had been walking for a while now, since they got off the lorry at the motor park, and the afternoon sun burned the back of his neck. But he did not mind. He was prepared to walk hours more in even hotter sun. He had never seen anything like the streets that appeared after they went past the university gates, streets so smooth and tarred that he itched to lay his cheek down on them. He would never be able to describe to his sister Anulika how the bungalows here were painted the colour of the sky and sat side by side like polite, well-dressed men, how the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves.

Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

[Rachael Burnett]

I was not sorry when my brother died. Nor am I apologising for my callousness, as you may define it, my lack of feeling. For it is not that at all. I feel may things these days, much more than I was able to feel in the days when I was young and my brother died, and there are reasons for this more than the mere consequence of age. Therefore I shall not apologise but begin by recalling the facts as I remember them that led up to my brother’s death, the events that put me in a position to write this account. For though the event of my brother’s passing and the events of my story cannot be separated, my story is not after all about death, but about my escape and Lucia’s; about my mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment; and about Nyasha’s rebellion – Nyasha, far-minded and isolated, my uncle’s daughter, whose rebellion may not in the end have been successful.

Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga

 

[Rachael Burnett]

When Carmella gave me a present of a hearing trumpet, she may have foreseen some of the consequences. Carmella is not what I would call malicious, she just happens to have a curious sense of humour. The trumpet was certainly a fine specimen of its kind, without being really modern. It was, however, exceptionally pretty, being encrusted with silver and mother o’pearl motives and grandly curved like a buffalo’s horn. The aesthetic presence of this object was not its only quality, the hearing trumpet magnified sound to such a degree that ordinary conversation became quite audible even to my ears.

Here I must say that all my senses are by no means impaired by age. My sight is still excellent although I use spectacles for reading, when I read, which I practically never do. True, rheumatics have bent my skeleton somewhat. This does not present me taking a walk in clement weather and sweeping my room once a week, on Thursday, a form of exercise which is both useful and edifying. Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society and believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit. The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures does not in any way discomfort me. I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of edible foods easy to procure and digestible to the stomach. Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are difficult to chew anyway.

The Hearing Trumpet
Leonora Carrington

 

[Rachael Burnett]

Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it – not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field – the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh, she and her brother and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word: -He is in Melbourne now.

'Eveline' in Dubliners
James Joyce