![]() He said, "Oh, it's a purple swamp hen." So I went home and looked this up, and the Romans in fact kept them as sort of ornamental birds, rather like small peacocks. And I saw a bird on it that I couldn't recognize, and I'm quite good at birds. For instance, the title story, which is called "The Purple Swamp Hen," arose from, there was a wonderful exhibition at the British Museum a few years ago, of a marvelous room with copies of the garden frescoes from one of the buildings at Pompeii. things like, something seen, something overheard. A short story, the idea comes and then you can get down to it." They're the most perverse things, short stories," she says, "but they're wonderfully different from writing a novel, which is hacking at the rock face. Lively tells me that although she hadn't written a short story for decades, "they suddenly came back. They are often short, even for short stories - and subtly simple, or, if you prefer, deceptively nuanced. ![]() ![]() Her latest is a collection that looks at life in ancient Pompeii, and modern-day western metropolises. The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is by Penelope Lively, who won the Man Booker Prize in 1987 for Moon Tiger and had a bestseller in How it All Began. One of the world's most lauded novelists has produced her first collection of short stories in decades. ![]()
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