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:
“Wags try to invent new stories to tell about the legislature, and end by telling the old one about the senator who explained his unaccustomed possession of a large roll of bills by saying that someone pushed it over the transom while he slept. The expression “It came over the transom,” to explain any unusual good fortune, is part of local folklore.”
—For the State of Montana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because—despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content—these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)