44 Scotland Street

Начало книги

Employees—Fiction. 3. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction.

4. Apartment houses—Fiction. 5. Roommates—Fiction. I. Title: Forty-four Scotland Street. II. McIntosh, Iain, ill. III. Title.

PR6063.C326A613 2005

823'.914—dc22

2005043627

w w w . a n c h o r b o o k s . c o m

v1.0

This is for Lucinda Mackay

Chapter title

vii

Preface

Most books start with an idea in the author’s head. This book started with a conversation that I had in California, at a party held by the novelist, Amy Tan, whose generosity to me has been remarkable. At this party I found myself talking to Armistead Maupin, the author of Tales of the City. Maupin had revived the idea of the serialised novel with his extremely popular serial in The San Francisco Chronicle. When I returned to Scotland, I was asked by The Herald to write an article about my Californian trip. In this article I mentioned my conversation with Maupin, and remarked what a pity it was that newspapers no longer ran serialised novels. This tradition, of course, had been very important in the nineteenth century, with the works of Dickens being perhaps the best known examples of serialised fiction. But there were others, of course, including Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which nearly landed its author in prison.

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