The first episode echoes Red Riding Hood and is firmly rooted in time and place:

The first episode echoes Red Riding Hood and is firmly rooted in time and place: the year is 1979, the location Trafalgar Square. A headscarfed woman approaches two young Scots girls who trust her sufficiently to share the details of their lives. In "Blank Card", anonymously sent flowers spark curiosity then passion between two lovers who invent playful vignettes of disguised identity which explore the erotic potential of the imagination.On the surface, the tales appear disparate, but on deeper consideration, there are myriad connections. Like Alice Thompson, Ali Smith eschews complex plots and rounded characters.

Instead, through pared down prose her tales uncover some essence of truth without recourse to overt didacticism.Smith's first novel Like and her previous short story collection Free Love demonstrate a mischievous disregard for readers' expectations, a characteristic evident here. Other Stories and other stories by Ali Smith Granta pounds 9.99Ali Smith's second short story collection is prefaced by Grace Paley's words: "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life." The epigraph resonates throughout the tales which themselves relate a journey in a Blakean vein, from innocence to experience. So Jim goes on being a good friend to me.William Riviere's latest book is `Echoes of War', published by Sceptre at pounds 6.99. Cut out that flabby bit, turn that other episode inside- out so it has the opposite effect, do a quick close-up of that character so he's much more vivid.

One day, despairing for about the 50th time, I picked up Lord Jim because it was lying around, and .. I didn't do any more writing that day But, slowly, as I read, glimmerings of hope began to return I thought, come on, it can be done. How to switch back and forth in time, and and in space, so that exactly the right impressions come to your reader's mind in the right order - that kind of thing. How to slide from one point of view to another, or to change from voice to voice, so it doesn't jolt but enrich the story - you hope.Trying to write a my latest novel, I kept getting stuck, naturally enough. Jim's public disgrace could still make me feel very cold, very sober, and his final personal victory moves me terribly - but now I was going back to the book for all sorts of nitty-gritty technical reasons.

Lord Jim has a fiendishly labyrinthine narrative structure, which I'd scarcely noticed when I was a boy (shows you how beautifully dove-tailed it is), and it started to change the way I thought about narrative form, the way I tried to put my stories together as powerfully as I could. I mean, I remember the shock of finding out that this guy I liked, liked in the thoughtless way you quite like yourself till you discover you don't, was capable of behaving extremely badly, was capable of abandoning a shipload of innocent people and jumping into a life-boat with a bunch of some of the nastiest shits Conrad was capable of describing when he really rolled up his sleeves for the job.Have you re-read it?I am still re-reading Conrad every now and then. Later I began to grasp a little how sad and how dangerous it was that Jim hadn't a clue how malevolent the sea can seem, nor how horrifying his own inner weaknesses might be No doubt that did me good. Those were the years when I wanted to win the Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race, so I knew all about Jim's longing to achieve heroic rescues at sea. When did you first read it? I was about 15. Why did it strike you so much?Jim starts out as a dreamy-headed boy with very little understanding either of the world or of himself, and I was just as romantic and hopeless, so I identified with him 100 per cent right from the first page.