Mortal Coils - The Stories

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.

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Famous quotes containing the word stories:

    There have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.
    Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)