I am twice your age with half your experience.
Job: visual artist.
Hobby:playing with language.
Email: textualsphinx@

Now sign up as as Textualsphinx, since numerous Sphinxes have appeared in Potterdom since I first chose the name from "Goblet of Fire" in September 2000 to Review with. I've kept the original moniker here so that you can still find me...

A very kind reader, Corgi, has collected all my stories together and given them stylish fonts and colourful backgrounds. You can find them at http:///people/Corgi/textualsphinx.fic.

(She says she was fed up with the time to download it all, and wanted to have all the stuff together in one place.) Many thanks Corgi.

House:

Gryffindor Super-ego, Ravenclaw Ego, Slytherin Inner Brat - but few quizzez are so Freudian.

I usually get Sorted to Gryffindor. I don't know why. My fics are Slytherin-sympathetic with pronounced Ravenclaw leanings.

A random selection from my favourite books:

Zadie Smith: "White Teeth" (A Must-read if you want to understand England.)
Adam Thorpe: "Ulverton" (ditto. *Incredible* language. A masterpiece. He hasn't matched it since.)
Toni Morrison: "Beloved" (of course) "Paradise".
Italo Calvino: "Invisible Cities"

Bertolt Brecht: "The Good Person of Setchuan" and all his theoretical writings.

Augusto Boal: "Theatre of the Oppressed" (a classic. More radical than Brecht).

Michel Foucault's "History of Sexuality".

Charlotte Bronte: "Villette" (Better than "Jane Eyre", neurotic where "Wuthering Heights" is psychotic.)

Primo Levi: "If This is A Man", "If Not Now, When"
Jean Rhys: "Good Morning Midnight" and "Wide Sargasso Sea"
George Elliot: "Middlemarch" "Daniel Deronda"
Jeanette Winterson: "The Passion"
Albert Camus: "La Peste"
Silvia Plath: "The Bell Jar"
Angela Carter: "Nights at the Circus"
Kasuo Ishiguro: "An Artist of the Floating World"
Darien Leader: "Why do Women Write More Letters than they Post?"
Milan Kundera "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (Overlook his sexism, because his analysis of Kitsch is so memorable.)
Linda Grant: When I Lived in Modern Times
Tracy Chevalier "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (take me to Delft NOW) and "Falling Angels".

Fantasy (for the under-20s)
Ursula Le Guin: 'Wizard of Earthsea' quartet.
Elizabeth A Romey: Lera of Tymoria, the Dragon Mage.