My novel, The Descent of the Lyre is due out in the summer of 2012 from Roman Books. It is a book about Bulgaria, banditry and guitar music, set in the early nineteenth century, and draws on Bulgarian folklore and history, and echoes of the tales of Orpheus (who is reputed to come from the…

Maria Taylor is a poet based in Loughborough in the UK. Her forthcoming collection, Melanchrini will be published in July 2012. I thought I would take a break from fiction here on Necessary Fiction to ask her about her book. Melanchrini draws upon personal experience, history, mythology and often beautifully honed observation, and is a…

A hitchhiker jumps up to her left, like a flame; a red scarf hangs around his neck. She slows down the car and then stops. He stands still for a second and watches. He can just see the whites of her eyes in the mirror. They catch the lights from her dashboard and they glow.…

Here, then, is another story from A Book of Changes. This one was written in Wuhan, a city famous for its heat, back in 2010. I visited the city in the height of summer, and the hours between mid-morning and late afternoon were almost unbearable. I wrote this story one evening after an exceptionally hot…

She came to me again last night. The breeze was slight. It might account for the trembling of Nottingham lace – how I hate its machined exactness – but not for the slow, deliberate lifting of velvet drapes. The curtain lifted slowly, unsteadily. Her hand must have trembled at the weight of it but she…

Earlier in the month I posted one story from my novel-of-sorts based around the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing 易經; and I thought I would follow it up with another. It is one of the stranger stories from the book, and is about fox spirits, ghosts and other such matters. Fox spirits or hulijing 狐狸精…

A short story for reading aloud by Jonathan Taylor You have to remember: smile, keep smiling, smile, keep smiling, smile, keep smiling, crotchet-crotchet-quaver-quaver, crotchet-crotchet-quaver-quaver…     The Principal Conductor always smiled when he conducted. And he always smiled when he said: “You have to remember. I am the Principal Conductor now.”     Ted did remember.    …

So when Steve asked me to be writer in residence here at Necessary Fiction, one idea that we had was that I could take happiness (or its opposite) as my theme. The reason for this is that I’ve just published two books that, in one way or another, touch on the topic of happiness. The…

One thing that I have gleaned from my many years of involvement with Buddhism (for which, see my thinkBuddha.org blog) is a deep and abiding appreciation of the aesthetic pleasures of lists. Buddhists, that is to say, love making lists: the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the thirty-seven factors conducive to awakening, the five…

Yolan was born into a carpenter’s family. He trained from childhood, following his fada around until he knew how to make cabinets, doorframes, tables and chairs. His fada said he would excel. The business was in good hands. When his apprenticeship finished, Yolan rejected his trade and began a new one: toymaking. His fada disowned…

Recently I read Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the first time. I was on a long train journey, and long train journeys are ideal for reading; so I launched into Nabokov’s strange tale of poets and Zemblan monarchs-in-exile and hired assassins and madmen. It is a deeply strange, sometimes funny, often maddening, fearsomely clever and—I confess—not…

To kick off proceedings for the month, here’s a short story from my current work-in-progress, a “novel of sorts” called A Book of Changes. This particular novel is a strange hybrid of a beast—in part a selection of stories, in part a series of travel and memoir pieces and in part a kind of philosophy…