October 2, 2013 Quote Unquote Loser Takes All By Sadie Stein 1978 photo of author Graham Greene. Credit: Karsh. “My business career lasted for a fortnight. They were a firm, I remember, of tobacco merchants. I was to go up to Leeds to learn the business and then go abroad. I couldn’t stand my companion. He was an insufferable bore. We would play double noughts and crosses and he always won. What finally got me was when he said, ‘We’ll be able to play this on the way out, won’t we?’ I resigned immediately.” —Graham Greene, the Art of Fiction No. 3
October 1, 2013 Quote Unquote The October Game By Sadie Stein Winslow Homer, An October Day, 1889. “He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.” —Ray Bradbury
September 30, 2013 Quote Unquote Other Voices By Sadie Stein “I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Register. There was a children’s page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I’ve forgotten which, but I wanted it badly. I had been noticing the activities of some neighbors who were up to no good, so I wrote a kind of roman à clef called “Old Mr. Busybody” and entered it in the contest. The first installment appeared one Sunday, under my real name of Truman Streckfus Persons. Only somebody suddenly realized that I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second installment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing.” —Truman Capote, the Art of Fiction No. 17
September 23, 2013 Quote Unquote Unmentionables By Sadie Stein “Where’s the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?” and other instances of lingerie in literature. (Yes, completely SFW.)
September 19, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Mike Royko By Clare Fentress “Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don’t want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: always remember to remove the bell from the cat’s collar before cooking.” —Mike Royko
September 18, 2013 Quote Unquote The Sort of Thing That Would Be Difficult to Explain to Someone from Another Planet By Sadie Stein “Walter White is a bigger monster than anyone in Westeros.” —George R. R. Martin