Yesterday's Weather

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This collection brings together stories written over the course of nineteen years. It includes all of Taking Pictures (Cape 2008), much of The Portable Virgin (Secker 1991), and two stories from Faber’s First Fictions: Introduction 10, which was my first outing into print in 1989.

The stories are presented here in reverse chronological order, partly, it has to be said, for the comic effect. I may be the only one who is laughing, but it is a great and private joke to see myself getting younger — shedding pounds and wrinkles, gaining in innocence and affectation — as the pages turn. The stories have been very lightly edited, not because I did not want to rewrite them, but because I found that I could not. It is impossible to inhabit a former self. You can not be the writer you were in 1989, nor, in a funny way, would you want to be. Still, there is much to regret — the fact that the creative moment is not one that can be repeated, is both a wonderful and a melancholy one. The path your words make as you herd them across the page is the only viable route, after all.

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