Authors/Short Stories

Question 1

A Family Supper

Answer 1

Kazuo Ishiguro

Question 2

Miles City, Montana

Answer 2

Alice Munro

Question 3

An Upheaval

Answer 3

Anton Chekhov

Question 4

The Garden Party

Answer 4

Katherine Mansfield

Question 5

Eveline

Answer 5

James Joyce

Question 6

Muggins Here

Answer 6

David Mitchell

Question 7

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

Answer 7

Ursula K LeGuin

Question 8

Bartleby

Answer 8

Herman Melville

Question 9

Dead Men’s Path

Answer 9

Chinua Achebe

Question 10

The Book of Sand

Answer 10

Jorge Luis Borges

Question 11

Seventeen Syllables

Answer 11

Hisaye Yamamoto

Question 12

“‘Since the firm folded,” he said, ‘I have a little more time on my hands.’ He laughed again, rather strangely. For a moment his face looked almost gentle. ‘A little more time’”

Answer 12

A Family Supper
Kazuo Ishiguro

Question 13

“it always seemed to me, when I recall this scene, that Cynthia turns very gracefully toward me, then turns all around in the water—making me think of a ballerina on point—and spreads her arms in a gesture of the stage. “Dis-ap-peared!” Cynthia was naturally graceful, and she did take dancing lessons, so these movements may have been as U have described. She did say “Disappeared” after looking around the pool, but the strangely artificial style of speech and gesture, the lack of urgency is more likely my invention.”

Answer 13

Miles City, Montana
Alice Munro

Question 14

“all sorts of absurd ideas came into her mind”

Answer 14

An Upheaval
Anton Chekhov

Question 15

“never in her life had she been subject to such an outrage, never had she been so deeply insulted…She, well-educated, refined, the daughter of a teacher, was a suspect of theft; she had been searched like a street-walker!”

Answer 15

An Upheaval
Anton Chekhov

Question 16

“she was so disgusted with Fedosya Vassilyevna, who was so obsessed by her illnesses that her supposed aristocratic rank, that everything in the world seemed to have become coarse and unattractive because this woman was living in it”

Answer 16

An Upheaval
Anton Chekhov

Question 17

“the gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them”

Answer 17

The Garden Party
Katherine Mansfield

Question 18

“Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought”

Answer 18

The Garden Party
Katherine Mansfield

Question 19

“little faint winds were playing chase in at the tops of the windows, out at the doors. And there were 2 tiny spots of sun, one on the ink pot, one on a silver photograph frame, playing too”

Answer 19

The Garden Party
Katherine Mansfield

Question 20

“she sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of rusty cretonne. She was tired.”

Answer 20

Eveline
James Joyce

Question 21

“but in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married—she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father’s violence”

Answer 21

Eveline
James Joyce

Question 22

“She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had the right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her”

Answer 22

Eveline
James Joyce

Question 23

“all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart”

Answer 23

Eveline
James Joyce

Question 24

“thank you for returning our lost sheep”
“down on the towpath there’s fisherman, not moving”
“just treating people like you’d want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot…”
“past the bridge, under a big sycamore, the path forks”

Answer 24

Muffins Here
David Mitchell

Question 25

“The place they got towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all”

Answer 25

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Ursula K LeGuin

Question 26

“he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreckage in the mid-Atlantic”

Answer 26

Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville

Question 27

“strangely huddled at the end of the wall—his knees drawn up, an lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones—I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred”

Answer 27

Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville

Question 28

“Going up stairs to my old haunt, there was Bartleby silently sitting upon the banister at the landing”

Answer 28

Bartleby, the Scrivener
Herman Melville

Question 29

“beautiful hibiscus and allamanda hedges in brilliant red and yellow marked out the carefully tended school compound from the rank neighbourhood bushes”

Answer 29

Dead Men’s Path
Chinua Achebe

Question 30

“the whole purpose of our school… is to eradicate just such beliefs as that. Dead men do not require footpaths”

Answer 30

Dead Men’s Path
Chinua Achebe

Question 31

“let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch”

Answer 31

Dead Men’s Path
Chinua Achebe

Question 32

“the line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hyper volume, of an infinite number of volumes… No—this, more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale.”

Answer 32

The Book of Sand
Jorge Luis Borges

Question 33

“Rosie ran between two patches of tomatoes, her heart working more rambunctiously than she had ever known it to. How lucky it was that Aunt Taka and Uncle Gimpachi had come tonight, thought, how very lucky. Otherwise she might not have really kept her half-promise to meet Jesus Carrasco. Jesus was going to be a senior in September at the same school she went to…”

Answer 33

Seventeen Syllables
Hisaye Yamamoto

Question 34

“I dipped my fingers into the water, then climbed in and sat down on the tin floor of the bath in that reassuring kitchen in front of the huge fire, and I leaned back in the hot water”

Answer 34

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

Question 35

“I was horrified, but it was initially the horror of something happening against the established order of things. I was fully dressed. That was wrong. I had my sandals on. That was wrong. The bath water was cold, so cold and so wrong”

Answer 35

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

Question 36

“My father did not like toasters. He toasted bread under the grill, and, usually, he burnt it”

Answer 36

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

Question 37

“The old woman gave me a lump of honeycomb, from the Hempstocks’ own beehive, on a chipped saucer, and poured a little cream over it from a jug. I ate it with a spoon, chewing the wax like gum, letting the honey flow into my mouth, sweet and sticky with an aftertaste of wildflowers”

Answer 37

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

Question 38

“A flash of resentment. It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having… given up her life. It wasn’t fair”

Answer 38

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

Question 39

“There was a wrestling match at the ticket window instead of a queue, because everyone wanted to be first; and as most people were carrying chickens or children or other bulky items, the result was a free-for-all out of which feathers and toys and dislodged hats kept flying”

Answer 39

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie

Question 40

“the trouble with you sad city types you think a place has to be miserable and full as ditchwater before you believe it’s real”

Answer 40

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie

Question 41

‘But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,’ declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, ‘if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?’

Answer 41

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie

Question 42

“skinny, scrawny, measly, weaselly, sniveling clerical types”

Answer 42

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie

Question 43

“you can offer [a story] to a young man who’s feeling blue, so that the magic of the story can restore his spirits”

Answer 43

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie

Question 44

“Haroun often thought of his father as a Juggler, because his stories were really lots of different takes juggled together, and Rashid kept them going in a sort of dizzy whirl”

Answer 44

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie

Question 45

“in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another”

Answer 45

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie