Flights of Fancy
Neurotic Literature
When he noticed that the wing of the aeroplane was falling apart, Alan Biengo was not surprised. After all, he had pretty much predicted that it was going to happen. Even so, he was absolutely furious. But when his skill for predicting calamity on an aeroplane proved more than a little astute, it was to lead him to make a discovery about the nature of flight that was all the more surprising considering how obvious it ought to be... In the final episode of this season of Neurotic Literature, we bring you a story for anyone who is a little bit afraid of flying.
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The Call of the Void
Neurotic Literature
'How strange... I was having a most wonderful dream.' When Gillian collapses at her granddaughter's ballet performance, her son Bradley is forced to confront his fears about vulnerability and mortality, still raw from a recent loss. But as doctors puzzle over her condition, Gillian becomes convinced that her deterioration is being caused by something - or someone - far beyond the explanation of medical science. Are her memories playing tricks, or is the voice in her sleep reaching for her - and, perhaps, for the rest of the family? A story about ghosts, whether they be real or imagined...
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The End of the War Against Terrorism
Neurotic Literature
Derek Smawk was an easy man to loathe. A squat figure with a pinched face, his track record prior to election had shown him entirely unsuited to the role of a public servant. Lazy, incompetent and a congenital liar, his all-round unattractiveness was matched by a kind of bullish incoherence when he spoke in public, as if he didn’t really think his audience merited the effort to make actual sense. He was, if nothing else, an unlikely person ever to be a Prime Minister, lacking as he was in personality or any notable skills. This was his biggest strength as a politician: being...
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What's Ben Most Anxious About Today?
Neurotic Literature
It's the first rule of the internet, isn't it? Be careful what you put out there: once online, it's there for everyone to see, for the rest of eternity. Yet here we all are, spaffing our thoughts all over social media, distributing our photographs whether mundane or indecorous, and generally putting every last bit of our personal lives out there on blogs, vlogs, tweets, tiktoks, snapchats, instas and, er, podcasts. (This is entirely a work of fiction, by the way. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,...
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A Mole Tragedy
Neurotic Literature
This is a story about Derek, the mole who didn't like digging. He liked all kinds of other things. Digging just happened to be a thing he did not like. Which might have been fine, except that he was a mole. And being a mole meant that certain things were expected of him. Digging, for example. But Derek was a very obstinate mole. Listen to the whole story to see how that works out for him. (Though there is a small clue in the title.)
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The Boy Who Read Books Meant For Girls
Neurotic Literature
It wasn’t Timothy Jenkins' fault. If nobody explains to you that content is intended only for a teenage, female audience, a juvenile reader will assume that it is all part of the rich pageant of literature, a glass held up to the lives of others in the way that is a feature of all fiction. The publishers should have made it clearer, probably. But they would no doubt argue that it was an issue of branding. That any prolific and bestselling author of children’s books is marketed with a certain consistency as a matter of course. If you’re apportioning blame, the publishers would say, blame...
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Season 3 trailer
Neurotic Literature
A glimpse of some of the delights awaiting in the hotly anticipated third season of Neurotic Literature, arriving imminently!
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The Perspex Vault
Neurotic Literature
It's a tough business, writing. All those hours, days, years even, of sweat and toil, writing and rewriting to turn out something heartfelt, original and possibly even brilliant, only to discover that you have merely completed the first leg of a far more arduous journey, one that will probably end with your finely wrought prose being discarded and read by nobody. Take this podcast, for instance. Blimmin' ages, it takes. The writing, the recording, the editing, the coming up with something pithy and enticing for the blurb (is this one succeeding? probably not). And for what? A handful of...
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The New Member
Neurotic Literature
"You know what I reckon? They’re so up against it, right, with the state of the hospitals and underfunding and so on, that they don’t know who’s in for what. So they do everything on everyone to be on the safe side." You will, no doubt, have your own views on the state of the NHS and the reasons (calculated or otherwise) for its 14 years (coincidental or otherwise) of neglect and underfunding. Do feel free to bang some pots and pans on your doorstep if it makes you feel better, but whatever your political viewpoint, I think we can all agree that our health service has been through some...
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Rectangles
Neurotic Literature
Folklore tells of a town where everyone was a mathematician. Each person was an expert, whether in arithmetic, algebra, geometry or topology; thanks to this expertise, measurements were always very precisely measured, definitions very precisely defined and costs very precisely calculated. Yet, as a mathematician called Simplex discovered, just because people think they've got everything worked out, doesn't mean they won't find themselves confronted by new ideas... A story about quadrilaterals, and the difference between knowledge and understanding.
info_outlineThere is an old adage that what you hear as a child will stay with you for the rest of your life. 'Careful the things you say,' as Stephen Sondheim so wisely wrote, 'children will listen'. Here is a story about something that a child heard which absolutely stayed with her for the rest of her life - which followed her around, which haunted her - and about a person who definitely wasn't careful about the things they said.
Mary is an ordinary six-year-old girl - not perfect, sometimes self-centred and a tiny bit spoilt - but there's nothing unusual in that, and certainly nothing to merit the ruining of her entire life. But words have consequences, don't they? And in the case of these words, some quite serious ones.
Ah well - you can't say that the warnings weren't available. But something tells me that Aunty Joyce probably wasn't much into Sondheim, and as for Mary's Mother... probably more of a Lin-Manuel Miranda person.
A story about growing up, about children's literature, and the importance of keeping your temper. Not to mention minding what you say.