The Fictional Work Is A Kind Of

The British And American Literary Worlds Operate In An Odd Kind Of Symbiosis: Our Critics Think Our Contemporary Novelists Are Not The Stuff Of Greatness Whereas Certain Contemporary Americans Indubitably Are. Their Critics Often Advance The Exact Opposite: British Fiction Is Cool, American Naff.

Television Is The Same As The Telephone, And The Same As The World Wide Web For That Matter. People Who Become Obsessed By The Peculiarities Of These Communications Media Have Simply Failed To Adjust To The Shock Of The Old. People Who Bleat On About The 'artistic' Potential Of Television Qua Television Are Equally Deluded.

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.

The Marvellous Thing About Writing, Whether It Be Fiction Or Journalism, Is That It Is Simultaneously The Most Intimate And The Most Anonymous Of Meetings Between People. It Is Profoundly Intimate In Reaching Into The Psyche Of Another, At The Same Time As Being Devoid Of Social Characteristics, Cultural Characteristics, Economic Characteristics.

Here We Meet, On The Page, Naked And Unadorned: Shorn Of Class, Race, Gender, Sexual Identity, Age And Nationality.