Name: Stella Grey*
*Stella Grey is a pseudonym
What’s it about? When her husband fell in love with someone else, Stella Grey thought she’d be unhappy for the rest of her life. But then she realised that she needed to take her future in her own hands. She needed to meet someone wonderful, and find a heartfix for heartbreak.
So, she joined online dating sites and embarked on a mission. What followed were 693 days of encounters, on screen and in person: dates in cafés and over glasses of astringent red wine, short term relationships and awkward sex, but mostly there were phone calls and emails (many, many emails). Her journey was never dull, featuring marriage proposals, invitations to Tangier, badly timed food poisoning and much younger men – but was it ultimately successful? Read more…
‘…all against the grave and tragic rhythm of the earth in its most timeless phase: the sea.’ William Faulkner
Authors tend to get serious when they portray the world’s oceans. They address the sea in reverent tones. It’s a mood inspired, at least in part, by the sea’s inhuman ancientness. The ocean reveals the brevity of humanity’s time on earth; that we’re just one of many short-lived species that primordially flopped out from its depths onto land. Yet perversely, while looking out to sea thinking of death, people have also marked it as a fine place to holiday. In light of this month’s vacation-orientated ‘Out of the Office’ theme, here are 4 great works on the sea:
International Youth Day marks a day to celebrate the contribution youths make to society, yet the experience of being ‘young’ varies so dramatically amongst individuals. Despite what many may wish, it isn’t the case that every young person has a stable environment to grow, develop and achieve his or her potential. The fact that young people are often deprived of those opportunities, through no fault of their own, is something that still shrouds me. Read more…
Up next, in this month’s Coming of Age theme, an extract from Bee Wilson’s First Bite. We are not born knowing what to eat; we each have to figure it out for ourselves. From childhood onwards, we learn how big a portion is and how sweet is too sweet. We learn to love broccoli – or not. But how does this happen? What are the origins of taste? And once we acquire our food habits, can we ever change them for the better? In this chapter, Bee tackles memory, and how our food memories hold emotional force year after year. Read more…
This month, our theme is Coming of Age. It’s a hugely important topic; that step from childhood to adulthood is incredibly formative, it crops up in almost every novel, and ultimately, we’ve all experienced it. Here, for you, is an extract from the wonderful Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman. In it, Hadley explores two of the most important facets of one of the most well-known coming of age films. Enjoy!
In my novel, Age of Consent, a newly teenaged girl is seduced by a man in his twenties through a process known as “grooming.” The idea of grooming is to create an emotional bond with a child that can then be used to foster a sexual relationship. I’ve experienced this process myself, back in the late 70’s when I was fourteen-years old. My husband, who was aged eleven when his abuser used him for sex, was also extensively “groomed.” Read more…
Find me someone who doesn’t like these and I’ll deliver you a batch myself. Deeply chocolatey brownies with a burst of melting salted caramel. I make a super-simple and speedy caramel that cools quickly, and gets chopped up and sunk into the top of the brownie mixture. The caramel melts into the brownie as it cooks and leaves little pools of chewy warm fudgy caramel throughout the perfectly crusted brownies. Read more…
Last month, Anna Jones, author of A Modern Way to Eat and A Modern Way to Cook, spent a very happy day with the brilliant food writer and owner of the Pear Cafe in Bristol, Elly Curshen, better known as Elly Pear. They have a lot in common – from favourite restaurants, teas and foods, not to mention a publisher. Anna and Elly got together to do a lot of eating and record a little food tour of Hackney in East London, where Anna lives, but ended up chatting about a whole lot more. Read more…
