Jeanette

Jeanette Winterson

The World & Other Places
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This is my first collection of short stories - made up of virtually every story I have written in thirteen years. It is a kind of short-hand of my fiction. All the themes are here - love, death, betrayal, the nature of time, the beauty of risk, the quest. Yes, always the need to push on, whatever the weather. Miracles too, because however uncool, I believe in them.

The earliest story, Psalms, is about a tortoise, and very much in the Oranges mould (or do I mean mold - it's such a long time ago?). There are mid-way stories, like The Poetics of sex, which I wrote for the Granta Best of Young British Novelists. It's about lesbian sex, and it's set out as a series of questions, mainly the questions I was getting all the time in the nineties from the British press. Funny lot - journalists.


The Poetics of sex - La poética del sexo
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Here comes Sappho, scorching the history books with tongues of flame. Never mind the poetry feel the erection. Oh yes, women get erect, today my body is stiff with sex. When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming. I will scale you and discover that size is no object especially when we're talking inches.

I like to be a hero, like to come back to my island full of girls carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here the doors are always open.
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