The Stories
- "The Gioconda Smile" is a short murder-mystery story, which Huxley later adapted into a 1947 film called A Woman's Vengeance.
- "Permutations Among the Nightingales" is a play concerning the amorous problems encountered by various patrons of a certain establishment.
- "The Tillotson Banquet" tells of an old artist who was thought to be dead, and is "rediscovered", and an honorary dinner that is organised for him.
- "Green Tunnels" is about the boredom of a young girl on holiday with her family. She develops a romantic fantasy, and is ultimately disillusioned.
- "Nuns at Luncheon" is a second-hand story told of a nun falling in love. The story mocks the writer's process, a concept Huxley used in his novel Crome Yellow.
Read more about this topic: Mortal Coils
Famous quotes containing the word stories:
“Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)