My favourite was ‘Looking up Vagina’ – a charming and poignant story about schoolboys’ fondness for looking up rude words in the dictionary.Īs well as a common geographical thread, the stories shared a background hum of apocalypse.

Nevertheless, the stories were sensitive, captivating and beautifully read. In terms of what actually happens, Jon’s tales were less remarkable than I thought they would be. Oddly though, barring the story about a woman who has a sugar beet crash through her windscreen, the stories that Jon chose to read at the Literary Festival were about fairly ordinary incidents in the lives of regular people a car accident, a schoolboy’s discovery of his first pube, and a woman observing the changing colours of autumn. Indeed, the promo literature says that Jon’s book (which I have to admit I haven’t read) contains stories about a boy setting fire to a barn and a father who is arrested when he tries to watch his daughter’s nativity play. The stories are billed as centring on the sort of events that readers would not imagine happening to them, but sometimes do. (If you visit Jon’s website you’ll find a map where you can click on each story for extra background details). Plus, he added wryly, he has two children to feed.Īll the short stories in Jon’s collection are linked by a common geographical thread – all started life in the flat, bleak landscape of the Lincolnshire Fens. Wearing a mac and opening a battered suitcase to reveal priced-up books, Jon explained to his bemused audience that he must sell his books in order to buy the time to write the next one. Writers are typically sheepish about presenting their writing as a commodity, but Jon makes no bones about the fact that his public performances are a way to peddle his wares. Jon McGregor visited Corpus Christi College to read from his collection of short stories, This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, but he looked like – and introduced himself as - a travelling salesman. This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You | Corpus Christi College, Sunday 1 April 2012 Daily Info Menu login / register List event Place ad

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