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…

Well, it’s April — the cruellest month and all that — and rather than breeding lilacs out of the dead land (whatever that might involve), or mixing memory and desire, or doing any of the other things that literary types should be getting up to in April, I’m going to be spending the next few…

I gave my design students at MICA the assignment “Observe and React.” They had to observe the actions of three strangers on three occasions. They had to describe the events and then react to the events in separate paragraphs numbered one through six. Jinhwan Kim is a Korean design student who speaks English as a…

As designers, we fill our rooms with objects that meet our design standards, formally or functionally, but we typically ignore the design of the first thing we see when we wake up: our alarm clock. Before the age of LCDs and LEDs, nixie tubes were the preferred way of electronically displaying numbers. Made of a…

I love PaperMate Sharpwriter #2 pencils. I have always been a doodler. From the time I could write, I have always sketched something. Little arrows and asterisks surround my to-do lists. Somehow I think that doodling around the thing that I’m actually supposed to be doing will help it get done. For most of my…