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"Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is a 2009 collection of short fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro. After six novels, it is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, though described by the publisher as a "story cycle". As the subtitle suggests, each of the five stories focuses on music and musicians, and the close of day. The hardback was published by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2009 and in the United States by Knopf in September 2009. Stories As the subtitle suggests, each story focuses on music and musicians, and the close of day. All of the stories have unfulfilled potential as a linking theme, tinged with elements of regret. The second and fourth stories have comic undertones. The first and final stories feature cafe musicians, and the first and fourth stories feature the same character. All five stories have unreliable male narrators and are written in the first person. * "Crooner" ** Set in Venice, a fading American singer co-opts a Polish cafe musician into accompanying him while he serenades his wife (whose relationship is disintegrating) from a gondola. * "Come Rain or Come Shine" ** In London, an expatriate EFL teacher is invited to the home of a couple whom he knew whilst at university. However the couple's tensions affect the visitor, leading to a rather awkward situation. * "Malvern Hills" ** A young guitarist flees London and lack of success in the rock world to the Malvern countryside cafe owned by his sister and brother-in-law. Whilst there he encounters Swiss tourists whose behaviour causes him to reflect on his own situation. * "Nocturne" ** A saxophonist recuperating after plastic surgery at a Beverly Hills hotel becomes involved with a wealthy American woman (the now ex-wife of the crooner in the first story) and ends up in a rather bizarre confrontation on stage of the hotel (involving an award statuette and a cooked turkey). * "Cellists" ** A Hungarian cellist falls under the spell of a fellow cellist, an apparently virtuosic American older woman, who tutors him. He later realises that she cannot play the cello as she was so convinced of her own musical genius, no teacher ever seemed equal to it, and so rather than tarnish her gift with imperfection, she chose never to realise it at all. Reception Robert Macfarlane writes in The Sunday Times that "Closing the book, it’s hard to recall much more than an atmosphere or an air; a few bars of music, half-heard, technically accomplished, quickly forgotten." Christian House of The Independent writes that "Ultimately this is a lovely, clever book about the passage of time and the soaring notes that make its journey worthwhile". References 2009 short story collections Works by Kazuo Ishiguro British short story collections Faber and Faber books "
"Portobello is a novel by British writer Ruth Rendell, published in 2008. It is set in and around the Portobello Road in Notting Hill, London. Written in the third-person narrative mode, it follows the lives of a number of Londoners-- rich and poor alike--living near the Portobello Road Market whose paths cross by accident rather than design. In other words, Portobello is about "the destinies of an oddly assorted group of people, whose only common characteristic is their postcode." Jane Shilling: "Portobello by Ruth Rendell -- Review", The Daily Telegraph (Telegraph.co.uk). Throughout the novel, something menacing seems to lurk behind every street corner, and the suspicion that something awful or sinister is going to happen any minute "(this is after all a novel by Ruth Rendell) is what hooks the reader" Lucy Atkins: "Portobello by Ruth Rendell", The Sunday Times (November 23, 2008). As "one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary London",Jane Jakeman: "The Fine Art of Mystery in Notting Hill", The Independent (November 21, 2008). Rendell has known the area and its inhabitants for so long that her "take on Notting Hill restores some of the rawness taken away by gentrification and the saccharine stammer of the film of the same name." Chris Petit: "The Dropped Wallet", The Guardian (November 29, 2008). Plot summary The central character of the novel is Eugene Wren, a wealthy, middle-aged art dealer whose secretive personality jeopardizes both his sanity and his relationship with, and eventual engagement to, Ella Cotswold, an attractive general practitioner ten years his junior. Having in the past overcome various slight addictions to alcohol, nicotine, and food, Wren gets hooked on a special brand of sugar-free sweet, which he wants to conceal from his fiancée. When the couple decide that Ella should sell her flat and she moves in with him, he starts inventing excuses and lies so as to be alone just for the time it takes to suck a sweet and to get rid of the sweet smell on his breath afterwards. Extremely ashamed of his habit, he buys, hoards, and consumes the sweets secretly, and he establishes several caches in his antique-studded home. When Ella happens to find one of them, out of curiosity goes on to search the rest of the house, and finally confronts Wren with her find, he is so ashamed of himself that he sees no other way than to break off their engagement and move into a hotel. References 2008 British novels Novels by Ruth Rendell Novels set in London Hutchinson (publisher) books "
"Sue Kerr Hicks (December 12, 1895 – June 17, 1980) was an American jurist who practiced law and served as a circuit court judge in the state of Tennessee. He is best known for his role as a co-instigator and prosecutor in the 1925 trial of John T. Scopes, a Dayton, Tennessee teacher accused of teaching the Theory of Evolution in violation of Tennessee state law. Hicks may have also been the inspiration for the Shel Silverstein song "A Boy Named Sue," which was popularized by Johnny Cash in 1969. Life and legal career Hicks was born in Madisonville, Tennessee on December 12, 1895. He was the youngest child of Charles Wesley and Susanna Coltharp Hicks. Hicks was named "Sue" after his mother, who died shortly after giving birth to him. Charles Wesley Hicks, Sue's father, was a prominent Madisonville lawyer, and Wesley J. Hicks, Sue's great-uncle, was the author of a manual on Tennessee Chancery law practice and played a key role in getting lawsuits dismissed against former Confederate officers in the Knoxville area after the American Civil War. Hicks trained at Hiwassee College and the University of Kentucky before joining his older brother, Herbert, in Dayton, where Herbert had been appointed acting Rhea County attorney.Charles Wesley Hicks, "My Day and Locality ," 1916. Transcribed for the web by Barbara Ribling, 2004. Retrieved: December 5, 2008. In Dayton, the Hicks brothers were regulars at the F.E. Robinson Drugstore, where the town's professionals often gathered to socialize and discuss issues of the day. In May 1925, the Hicks brothers and other regulars became involved in a discussion over an American Civil Liberties Union advertisement seeking a challenge to the Butler Act, a recently-enacted state law barring the teaching of the Theory of Evolution. Realizing the publicity such a case would bring to Rhea County, the group -- who would eventually become known as the "drugstore conspirators" -- decided to engineer a case that would test the constitutionality of the Butler Act. The group recruited local physics teacher John T. Scopes -- a friend of Sue's -- to admit to teaching the Theory of Evolution. One of the conspirators, George Rappleyea, swore out a warrant for Scopes' arrest on May 5, and charges were filed the following day.Marcel LaFollette, Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 5-10. Sue Hicks served as a member of the Scopes Trial prosecution team, although his role was overshadowed by the presence of William Jennings Bryan, an activist and former presidential candidate who had been invited to join the team as a special prosecutor. While the trial was successful in bringing publicity to Rhea County, much of the publicity was negative, and portrayed local residents as backward and uneducated. Although Scopes was convicted -- as had been planned -- the "test case" came to an end in 1927, when the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled the Butler Act constitutional, but overturned Scopes' conviction on a technicality. This kept the case out of the federal court system and ended any chance of it proceeding to the United States Supreme Court, which the drugstore conspirators had originally hoped.George Webb, "The Scopes Trial." The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, 2002. Retrieved: December 5, 2008.Michael Birdwell, "Tennessee In Film." The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, 2002. Retrieved: December 7, 2008. Hicks later wrote the following about his views on the trial: > We cannot speak other than with commendation as to the conduct of Judge > Raulston in the Scopes Case. It was a very trying case. Religious fanatics, > reds, and all manner of rabble were assembled at this trial, and at times > the excitement of the crowd became almost a frenzy, and almost beyond the > control of the small number of officers which we had at our disposal. Beside > the attorneys for the defense did every thing they could to provoke the > Court and to get on the front pages of the newspapers as much as they could, > so the situation was very hard to handle. Between 1936 and 1958, Hicks served as a state circuit court judge, and continued to serve in a reserve status until the 1970s. He presided over more than 800 murder cases, and gained a reputation for being "fair" and "tough".Richard Urban, "Ultimate Penalty -- The Story of William Tines, Tennessee's Last Dead Man Walking ." November 14, 1996. Retrieved: December 5, 2008. In the mid-1960s, Hicks served as president of the Fort Loudoun Association, and led the early opposition to the Tennessee Valley Authority's plans to build Tellico Dam at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River.Kenneth Murchison, The Snail Darter Case: TVA Versus the Endangered Species Act (Lawrence Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007), p. 20. Hicks died on June 27, 1980 in Sweetwater, Tennessee. He is buried at Haven Hill Memorial Gardens in Madisonville. The Sue K. Hicks Papers, which consist primarily of Hicks's correspondence regarding the Scopes Trial and later legal cases, are on file at the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library in Knoxville. Inspiration for "A Boy Named Sue" Hicks's oddly feminine first name may have inspired the song, "A Boy Named Sue", which Johnny Cash first performed in 1969. The song's author, Shel Silverstein, attended a judicial conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee--at which Hicks was a speaker--and apparently got the idea for the song title after hearing Hicks introduced. While Cash said he was unaware that Silverstein had any one person in mind when he wrote the song, he did send Hicks two records and two autographed pictures with the inscription, "To Sue, how do you do?" While his name may have inspired the song's title, Hicks pointed out that the character in the song's lyrics--who seeks revenge against his father after a lifetime of teasing--bore little resemblance to his own life. Hicks's father named him after his deceased mother, who had died from complications with Hicks's birth, rather than, as the song suggests, to make him "strong". Hicks also claimed to have always had a sense of humor about his name, and did not consider it a source of derision. In 1970, Hicks noted: "It is an irony of fate that I have tried over 800 murder cases and thousands of others, but the most publicity has been from the name 'Sue' and from the evolution trial. ... I was named Sue for my mother, who died after childbirth." See also *Ray Jenkins *John Randolph Neal Jr. References External links *Scopes Trial: A Creation and Science History Project -- trial transcript *Sue K Hicks Papers, University of Tennessee Knoxville Libraries * Tennessee state court judges People from Madisonville, Tennessee 1895 births 1980 deaths University of Kentucky alumni 20th-century American judges "