Collected Short Fiction Read Online Free

Crake
.
Adichie:
Purple Hibiscus
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Iraq weapons crisis. American and British troops invade Iraq. Civil war in Dafur.
    2004
    AUTHOR’S LIFE:
Magic Seeds
.
    LITERARY CONTEXT: Munro:
Runaway
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Terrorist bombings in Madrid. Beslan school hostage crisis. Ten countries join the European Union. Indian Ocean tsunami.
    2005
    LITERARY CONTEXT: Banville:
The Sea
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Terrorist bombings of 7/7 in London. Major earthquake in Pakistan. Death of Pope John Paul II.
    2006
    LITERARY CONTEXT: Kiran Desai:
The Inheritance of Loss
.
Murakami:
Blind Willow
,
Sleeping Woman
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Iran announces that it has joined the nuclear club. Conflict between Israeli and Hezbollah forces in South Lebanon. Saddam Hussein hanged.
    2007
    AUTHOR’S LIFE:
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling.
    LITERARY CONTEXT: Hosseini:
A Thousand Splendid Suns
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister in UK. Benazir Bhutto assassinated. Anti-government demonstrations in Burma.
    2008
    LITERARY CONTEXT: Pamuk:
The Museum of
Innocence
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Largest global recession since Great Depression begins. Barack Obama becomes first African-American to be elected US President.
    2009
    LITERARY CONTEXT: Mantel:
Wolf Hall
.
Byatt:
The Children’s Book
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Israel invades Gaza. Defeat of Tamil Tigers ends 26 years of civil war in Sri Lanka.
    2010
    AUTHOR’S LIFE:
The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of
African Belief
.
    HISTORICAL EVENTS: Earthquake in Haiti. Major oil spill in Mexican Gulf. David Cameron becomes Conservative Prime Minister in UK, leading coalition government.

1 BOGART
    EVERY MORNING WHEN he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’
    Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard, ‘What happening there, Hat?’
    It was something of a mystery why he was called Bogart; but I suspect that it was Hat who gave him the name. I don’t know if you remember the year the film
Casablanca
was made. That was the year when Bogart’s fame spread like fire through Port of Spain and hundreds of young men began adopting the hardboiled Bogartian attitude.
    Before they called him Bogart they called him Patience, because he played that game from morn till night. Yet he never liked cards.
    Whenever you went over to Bogart’s little room you found him sitting on his bed with the cards in seven lines on a small table in front of him.
    ‘What happening there, man?’ he would ask quietly, and then he would say nothing for ten or fifteen minutes. And somehow you felt you couldn’t really talk to Bogart, he looked so bored and superior. His eyes were small and sleepy. His face was fat and his hair was gleaming black. His arms were plump. Yet he was not a funny man. He did everything with a captivating languor. Even when he licked his thumb to deal out the cards there was grace in it.
    He was the most bored man I ever knew.
    He made a pretence of making a living by tailoring, and he had even paid me some money to write a sign for him:
    TAILOR AND CUTTER
Suits made to Order
Popular and Competitive Prices
    He bought a sewing machine and some blue and white and brown chalks. But I never could imagine him competing with anyone; and I cannot remember him making a suit. He was a little bit like Popo, the carpenter next door, who never made a stick of furniture and was always planing and chiselling and making what I think he called mortises. Whenever I asked him, ‘Mr Popo, what you making?’ he would reply, ‘Ha, boy! That’s the question. I making the thing without a name.’ Bogart was never even making anything like this.
    Being a child, I never wondered how Bogart came by any money. I assumed that grown-ups had money as a matter of course. Popo had a wife who worked at a variety of jobs; and ended up by becoming the friend of many men. I could never