01 - If Beale street could talk (James Baldwin)
I said, 'Alonzo, we're going to have a baby.' I looked at him. I know I smiled. His face looked as though it were plunging into water. I couldn't touch him. I wanted so to touch him. I smiled again and my hands got wet on the phone and then for a moment I couldn't see him at all and I shook my head and my face was wet and I said, 'I'm glad. I'm glad. Don't you worry. I'm glad.'
ISBN: 9001548741

02 - The millstone (Margaret Drabble)
'I'm pregnant,' I said crossly.
'Oh,' said Joe, and kept on walking. After a few yards he said, 'You're not going to have it, are you?'
'Yes, I am' I said.
'Whatever for?'
'Why not? I don't see why I shouldn't, do you?'
'I can think of a hundred reasons why you shouldn't. I think it's an utterly romantic stupid nonsensical idea. I think you're out of your mind'.

ISBN: 9001548741

03 - Bright lights, big city (Jay McInerney)
You sit down on a piling and look out over the river. Downriver, the Statue of Liberty shimmers in the haze. Across the water, a huge Colgate sign welcomes you to New Yersey, the Garden State.
You watch the solemn progress of a garbage barge, wreathed in a cloud of screaming gulls, heading out to sea.
Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.

ISBN: 9001548741

04 - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
...and as I looked, there came, I thought, a change - he seemed to swell - his face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter - and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

ISBN: 9001548741

05 - The loved one (Evelyn Waugh)
'We had a Loved One last month who was found drowned. He had been in the ocean a month and they only identified him by is wrist-watch. They fixed that stiff so he looked like it was his wedding day. The boys up there surely know their job. Why, if he'd sat on a atom bomb, they'd make him presentable.'

ISBN: 9001548741