And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp [...]

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. This arrests us within the narrator’s trapped  psychological time-line. We are in a world of haunting recurrence. Dreams secrete messages that require careful unlocking. We are invited into a world of hidden codes, lost desires. ‘Manderley’ impresses as it sounds both mythic and real. This conflation [...]

CrushThe older she gets,the more she awakeswith somebody’s face strewn in her headlike petals which once made a flower.What everyone doesis sit by a deskand stare at the view, till the timewhere they live reappears.  Mostly in words.Imagine a girlturning to seelove stand by a window, taller,clever, anointed with sudden light.Yes, like an angel then,to [...]

‘It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday’s Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will undertake me through much of the finest countryside of [...]

When the Kelveys were well out of sight of Burnells’, they sat down to rest on a big red drain-pipe by the side of the road. Lil’s cheeks were still burning; she took off the hat with the quill and held it on her knee. Dreamily they looked over the hay paddocks, past the creek, [...]

Chapter 1 1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect [...]

Toni Morrison: Beloved124 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, [...]