‘Maybe it wasn’t true that there were no arts of living’. This is a blog on Garth Greenwell (2024) ‘Small Rain’.

There are no answers in this novel about ‘how to live’ other than the possibility that there might be, but possibly  too there aren’t,  ‘provisional truths’. Sometimes wisdom looks like the realisation that: ‘Maybe it wasn’t true that there were no arts of living’.[1] In this novel Garth Greenwell leaps from the queered description of … More ‘Maybe it wasn’t true that there were no arts of living’. This is a blog on Garth Greenwell (2024) ‘Small Rain’.

“Much depends on it being a story that people will listen to greedily and be desperate to pass on”. This is a blog on Mark Haddon’s ‘Dogs and Monsters’ (2024).   

In the first story of Mark Haddon’s Dogs and Monsters (2024), named The Mother’s Story, a wily inventor and engineer, capable perhaps of only inventing dangerous fictions says of a story he is in the process of telling: “Much depends on it being a story that people will listen to greedily and be desperate to … More “Much depends on it being a story that people will listen to greedily and be desperate to pass on”. This is a blog on Mark Haddon’s ‘Dogs and Monsters’ (2024).