The Book The Book of Ands and Other Stories of Ands and Other Stories

Robert Grossmith

© Robert Grossmith 2012

Contents

Preface, or Why the Short Story Is Better Than the Novel

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The Book of Ands

The Several Lives of Austin Bryan

Life Among the Destructivists: a Memoir of the 1960s

The Age of Or

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Company

S/he

Time and HG Wells

The Book of Ands and Other Stories How Not to Write a Story

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The Shed

Snobs and The Book of Ands and Other Stories Yobs

Marx, Lenin and Brian

World Poets

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About the Author

Preface, or Why the Short Story Is

Better Than the Novel

The short story, we're frequently told, is the perfect literary The Book of Ands and Other Stories form for today's high-pressure, schedule-driven, no-time-to-spare world. The Book of Ands and Other Stories Ideal for the half-hour commuter ride to work on the train, or even for reading on your smartphone while you stand in line at the post office and the human centipede in front of you inches slowly forward. The short story gives us a quick narrative fix without the longueurs traditionally associated with the novel.

Another thing we're often told is that novel-reading has been replaced by moviewatching. After all, who has time to read a 400-page family saga full of lengthy descriptions of over-furnished interiors and brooding thundery skies when a movie camera can reveal these things – and more -- in an instant?

All of the above may be true. But in that case why are people still reading novels? And why has the much-heralded resurgence (or actually just surgence) of the short story The Book of Ands and Other Stories yet to occur?

My guess is that it has something to do with the amount of emotional energy the reader invests in the characters in a story or novel. It's hard to get too involved The Book of Ands and Other Stories in the lives of people who you know will vanish in 10 or 20 pages' time. You might even feel slightly cheated that these individuals who've you've taken the trouble of getting to know will depart the stage almost as The Book of Ands and Other Stories soon as they've arrived.

In the novel, on the other hand, you can at least relax. These characters are likely to be around for The Book of Ands and Other Stories a while, I can get to know them slowly and at my own pace, they're not going anywhere. The short story deals in brief but intense encounters, the novel in meaningful long-term relationships.

So perhaps my preference for the short story over the novel says something deeply worrying about my attitude to personal relationships. I wouldn't be surprised.

In actual fact, of course, the very best short story writers – the likes of William Trevor or Raymond Carver or Alice Munro or Flannery O'Connor – manage to create characters who are every bit as rounded and fleshed-out as the characters The Book of Ands and Other Stories in most novels, sometimes more so. It's just that they don't take 400 pages to do it.

But there are other advantages to the short story, aside from its simple economy. There are things you can do in the short story that wouldn't be tolerated in most novels. You can for example conveniently neglect whole areas of a character's biography that have no direct bearing on the story in ways that would leave your average novel-reader feeling shortchanged, like those Russian peasants who saw the early films of Eisenstein and rioted because the movie contained close-ups: 'We bought a full-price ticket, we expect to see a full-size man, not just his head and shoulders.'

The Book of Ands and Other Stories

Best of all, you can reread a The Book of Ands and Other Stories favourite short story in a matter of minutes rather than days, enjoying it all over again. Rereading War and Peace or Middlemarch demands rather more commitment.

The stories collected here were written at various points over the last 30 years or so. Around half of them have been published in print and one of them online, the rest are previously unpublished. They are arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, in three sections. Section One contains stories with a particular literary, artistic or philosophical theme. The stories in Section Two are genre stories of one kind or another: a ghost story, a time-travel story, a futuristic satire on sexual politics and a postmodern metafiction. Section Three collects together a number of semi-autobiographical stories about growing up in Dagenham in the 1960s and early '70s.

One day perhaps the short story will finally triumph over the novel. People in that blessed future age will look back at the novel and be amazed by its popularity, as we are amazed today by the pre-eminent literary status once enjoyed by poetry. The novel will take on a fabled aspect. Did people really read big fat books full of long descriptions and unnecessary information? our ancestors will ask in a tone of slightly bemused wonderment. How many pages?

The Book of Ands

Written 1984 Bristol, first published 1988 in Critical Quarterly. Reprinted in Best Short Stories 1989, The Best of Best Short Stories 1986-1995 and Sixteen Modern Short Stories.

The story was inspired by – and deliberately mimics in style and structure -- another story about an infinite book, in this The Book of Ands and Other Stories case an encyclopedia, 'The Book of Sand' by Jorge Luis Borges. These days, of course, we all have access to an infinite book, called the Internet.

Incidentally, the remark of the bookseller Kowalski – 'If everyone wrote their own books, what would become The Book of Ands and Other Stories of the The Book of Ands and Other Stories humble bookseller?' -- strikes me today as unintentionally prescient.

In the beginning was the word and...

St John 1:1

And and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and ...

I quote from memory the opening words of the Book of Ands. In the intervals between the conjunctions lies my story, lie all stories. I'm sorry, this is not the best way to begin. Let me try again.

It is a convention of most stories these days to declare their own fictiveness. My story, however, is true. I live alone in a top-floor flat in a small university town in a universe expanding at both ands. One more try.

Alone in my flat one afternoon a few months ago (better), I heard a The Book of Ands and Other Stories ring at the door. I The Book of Ands and Other Stories opened it and a stranger stood there. Dressed in a brightly-coloured headband, a tie-dyed grandad vest and plastic sandals, he had an anachronistic look about him. I asked him what he wanted.

'Got some books to sell,' he said. 'Sci-fi and fantasy mainly. The guy in the bookshop round the corner said you might be interested.'

I could not restrain a smile. Whenever old Kowalski found himself beleaguered by students trying to unload their books on him for holiday money at the end of the summer term, he always gave them my address, though he knew my tastes were specialized and my funds limited. I would invariably send them on their way unrewarded after examining their wares with a pretence of interest. It was a sort of running joke between us.

'Well, you've come to the right place,' I said. 'I am something of a collector, yes.' I gestured behind me to the sagging bookshelves lining my walls. 'So what rarities do you have to offer me?'

He loosened The Book of Ands and Other Stories the drawstring of the duffel bag he carried on his shoulder and emptied its contents onto the mat at my feet. In the cataract of dogeared paperbacks with garish covers and fanciful titles disgorged for my inspection, my eye fixed on a slim hardback still sporting its glossy white jacket (though somewhat stained and darkened by age), like a dinner guest at the wrong party. The dustflap bore the title The Book of Ands and below it in smaller print the author's name, George Lewis Berg.

'What's this?' I said, picking out the volume from the mass grave in which it lay halfburied and opening it at random. The page was filled with regularly-spaced columns of the single word 'and.' I thumbed further ahead, then back to the beginning; each page was the same. 'Seems to be some sort of joke, isn't it, a parody?' I said to hide my dismay, thinking of Hemingway and Dickens, those aficionados of the 'and.'

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