The copper one threw her arms around the dark one and they kissed at the side of the river. I have never seen a kiss on one of my walks, not a long desperate kiss like that. I had to slow down so that I wouldn’t have to pass right by it. It just went on and on and on. The river moaned and rushed and the sun spilled right along the river bank and this kiss continued. It looked to me, as I walked towards it, like the kiss of the century. It was stunning, compelling. I knew I should look at golfers but I couldn’t. I had to pass close to them and hold in my breath in a sort of movement of sympathy. I had to get past them. I couldn’t turn back. Who could turn their back on such a kiss? I have not myself had one. A long wet kiss like that. I started to lick my lips quite unconsciously until I noticed myself doing it. Strolling by the river licking my lips. I was about a yard away from them and my footsteps could have been heard, my presence could have been sensed. I walked past them and nobody looked up. I climbed up the stone steps to the old iron bridge. In days gone by I would have had to pay a halfpenny toll to cross this bridge, I thought to myself, clutching at facts to try and remove the impact of the kiss. When was this bridge built? 1816. I turned and looked to my side and the kiss was still going strong. Who was Jackson? Why is the pub called Jackson’s Boat? Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. I was hot, sweating. My heart was beating like a bird’s. I felt light-headed as if I had gulped a whole gale.

The title story, about a woman who self-harms, creeps up on you and suddenly takes you by the throat in the final paragraph. Jackie Kay has a sense of the dramatic as well as an ever-present willingness to experiment with language.

Kay is compassionate and brutal at the same time in many of these stories. Her subjects are often outcasts, living on the edge of transformations, often encrusted with surrealistic imagery like the treasures in an old chest.

In quick succession she gives us Brian Murphy, a man who lives nowhere near the sea but is obsessed with sharks. Melanie who lives on fish except at weekends because she only needs her brain during the week. Irene Elliot, haunted by cutlery. The oldest woman in Scotland, who sounds like the sea. Doreen, a woman in the process of turning into a tortoise. Two teachers, Physics and Chemistry, with a love that is impossible to hide. And a woman with a dying lover living out the dregs of their time together in a mythic elephantine landscape.

If you’ve heard the rumour that the short-story is dead, take a look at some of these and reconsider.

Muslims bridle at the broad strokes by which they are depicted. Every time a writer or politician or policeman begins a sentence by saying “Muslims must …”, there is little recognition of the sheer variety of belief within Islam, or of the cultural diversity among Muslims, or of the everyday pragmatic reality of what it means in a secular age to believe in God and to try to live by that belief. In this respect Muslims are like anyone else. Some are devout, some are not at all, some are not very much, and some are devout sometimes. Some are sinners; they fall down and try to get up again. Some are hypocrites who fall down and pretend to be still on their feet. Many fail to live up to their religion’s, and their own, high expectations of themselves. Many have sex outside marriage, as many Catholics do. Some Muslims drink alcohol, as some Jews eat pork. A few, in common with a few Christians, think gay people should be murdered. Observant Muslims contest, dispute, accept and reject points of doctrine exactly as those from other faiths do. The Qur’an, as one Muslim put it to me, is not a program to be loaded and Muslims are not computers.

And The Guardian makes an offer – We would love to hear about the book that first opened your eyes to the women’s movement. Whether it was one you found hugely inspiring, or an anti-feminist book that riled you into action, please write to women@guardian.co.uk, and we will publish a selection of your stories in the coming weeks.

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Websites that authors should avoid . . .

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I went to see the film, Michael Clayton. George Clooney is always worth watching. But this time around he was overshadowed by a wonderful performance from Tom Wilkinson. The movie itself was fluff.

Waking in the night, the coroner went outside to the garden and taking his easement, heard shouts and uproar nearby. Finishing his business, he took his sword and went out to the way in front, where he found Adam and the tippler roused from their beds by the agitation. It was the dark time of the moon and shapes and shadows slipped by like phantoms while men with torches ran here and there, shouting oaths and threats. A shadow loomed over him and Brigge levelled his sword against the belly of a man who brought himself up to a sharp halt.

Bennett’s dystopian novel, preceded by a quotation from Goethe -

Mistrust all in whom the desire to punish is imperative

- opens in Northern England at the beginning of the 1630s. The Puritans are in control of the town and the initial idealism which accompanied their cause has degenerated into factionalism and fanaticism. No one is safe.

I generally avoid novels set in this period because I find it difficult to deal with so much brutality, gore and cruelty. And those elements are, of course, present in Bennett’s novel, although alleviated frequently by a masterful use of language.

Brigge is the town coroner and one of its governors. He is sitting in judgement on an apparently obvious case of infantilism concerning a certain Katherine Shay. But feels he has to interview a witness who the constable seems reluctant to produce. Eventually Brigge sets out to discover the missing witness himself.

At the same time the other governors of the town are involved in a power battle with secret arrests, false and hear-say evidence, and an increasing strangle-hold on the citizens of the town. Catholics and their priests are linked to heretics and fornicators, adulterers and beggars, and all of them are hurried through the inquisitors and towards the scaffold and the hangman.

Meanwhile the general populace, fearful of the unseen terrors which would take them in their beds, are whipped into a lust for revenge.

Bennett draws no easy or clichéd conclusions about our own time or the war on terror. He tells a story.

I think it’s rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well.

Salman Rushdie

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Chances are that if you are a writer a little further down the food chain, but lucky enough to have an agent, they won’t be doing much for you. Restless writers, like I used to be, may change agencies frequently, only to find out that after a brief honeymoon all is back to normal – for most writers changing agencies is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic as they watch the promises of their career go down the drain.

Martin Wagner at The Guardian

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“Underwear” and “lingerie” reflect and construct opposing world views. Ruth Wajnryb in the Sydney Morning Herald, tells us why.

I tend to stay away from political prigs even when I am in sympathy with their cause. I can smell piety a mile away and prefer the company of sinners . . . Besides they might catch me eating a Big Mac.

Sam Smith on Prigs in Public Life

The film is a hauntingly beautiful meditation on life and death and follows a lonely and elderly professor on a car journey to accept an honorary degree. Along the way he is forced to come to terms with his own mortality, and begins to reflect on his life, his regrets, and his childhood memories.

Accompanied by his daughter-in-law (Ingrid Thulin), the trip is transformed into a journey in and out of the man’s past as the boundary between reality and dream blurs.

The viewer slowly comes to realize that the doctor is in fact two people in one body. Although he has been a good doctor and an invaluable asset to many in the community, to those closest to him he has been little more than a cold rationalist and a pedant.

Bergman gives us the man and at the same time, because he is stripped down to his soul, we retain sympathy for him. Low key and understated as the action is, the emotional impact of this story is enormous.

At the beginning of the film we are introduced to a man who has isolated himself emotionally from his closest family and friends, and within the 90 minutes it takes to get to the end of the film we see him come through a renaissance of redemption.

In its revelation of human character, desire, and chagrin, Wild Strawberries is a powerful and masterful film.

JoAn Karkos of Lewiston was so horrified by the children’s book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health by Robie Harris, illus. by Michael Emberley (Candlewick, 1993) that she checked out the copies from local public libraries and is now refusing to return them.

The plot continues to thicken . . .