Until recently, however, I had given no thought to how much worse it must be for the hapless picture archivists whose desks we regularly deluge with implausible, bizarre and ill-thought-out requests. There are several libraries we regularly hit up for images, such as the Bridgeman, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery and, of these, the Getty picture library is probably one of the biggest, with about 65 million images in its collection. No doubt sick of receiving idiotically broad briefs from editors such as myself (‘We need a painting of King Richard. Which one? Umm, all of them?’) last autumn they sponsored a competition through regular London short film evening Short and Sweet aimed at illustrating the many ways in which the archive could be used. Check out the four very different, very entertaining results, particularly the winning entry, ‘Photograph of Jesus’, which provides a wonderfully rueful insight into the often ludicrous lot of the picture archivist.

I have loved Middlesex since first reading it on Bondi beach, four years ago. Despite the insistent beauty of my surroundings and the offensively bronzed and healthy-looking Aussies frolicking in the surf around me, I found myself completely transported by Calliope’s story and barely put the book down in the day it took me to tear obsessively through it. I have been raving about it to friends and total strangers ever since.

I therefore leapt at the chance to work with Pulitzer-winner Jeffrey Eugenides on My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, a quixotically named collection of classic love stories edited by the great man himself, which features work from some of the greatest writers of the last century – from Chekhov to Faulkner, Eileen Chang to Alice Munro.

The quality of writing is stunning and the project has been a joy to work on: even the disappointment of not being able to clear permission to include Joyce’s elegiac ‘The Dead’ in the UK edition was offset by the thrill of conversations with his grandson, which meandered impressively from Schiller through to Franz Fanon and (rather implausibly) ice hockey.

The calibre of the contributors aside, however, in any anthology the selection is as significant to the shape of the finished book as the stories themselves. In conversation with book critic Andrea Hoag (which follows below) and in his introduction to the book (which we’ll be posting in time for Valentine’s Day), Jeffrey explains how he chose which stories to include, which he particularly loves, and which ones got away…

Andrea Hoag: What was the process of elimination like? Can you discuss which stories you decided to leave out?

Jeffrey Eugenides: The story I miss most is “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx. I picked it, but we weren’t able to the secure the rights to reprint it, even though the anthology supports a charitable cause. The UK edition lacks James Joyce’s “The Dead” for similar reasons. (Happily, “The Dead” is in public domain in the U.S.) The first thing you confront when you compile an anthology like this, however, is the painful obligation to exclude wonderful work. Lots and lots of it. The only way I could sleep at night was to remind myself it was all for a good cause. How did I choose? The way people choose their mates: for intelligence, beauty, humor, and a sense that they’ll be around for the long haul.

AH: You say in your introduction that “sober middle-age had made me less susceptible to [Nabokov’s] lush lyricism.” In a way, editing this collection brought you back into the proverbial fold where he was concerned. Why do you feel that he is “much better…than everybody else…”?

JG: In all honesty, I was never out of the fold. Nabokov has always been and remains one of my favorite writers. He’s able to juggle ten balls where most people can juggle three or four. “Spring in Fialta” works on so many levels: as an affecting tale of thwarted love; a reinactment of the literary process by which we fall victim to, and memorialize, our loves; and a philosophical rumination on time and fate. The sentences are perfect, the emotion deep, the intellectual scintillation nearly blinding. Pure bliss, in other words.

AH: I’ve been building up an imaginary shrine in my home dedicated to the cult of Lorrie Moore and I almost wept when I read the line from “How to Be An Other Woman” that goes… “he laughs, smooth, beautiful, and tenor, making you feel warm inside of your bones. And it hits you; maybe it all boils down to this: people will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh….” I truly believe that. Don’t you think most people–smart, thinking people–would do just about anything for someone with a nice laugh?

JG: I’m glad you like the Lorrie Moore Story. Lorrie herself doesn’t. She wrote it when she was twenty-four, and neither my own appreciation of the story, nor my assurances that many people insisted I include it, were enough to dissuade her from detesting her own “immature” work. This is a sign of a great writer, by the way. But “How to be An Other Woman” remains a great story. In addition, since a lot of the stories in the anthology share a traditional narrative structure, the Moore story comes as a nice shift in tone and strategy. I was conscious of that, too, in putting the book together, the DJ aspect of the whole thing, moving from fast numbers to slow dances and back again.

AH: Can you talk a little bit about the charity the proceeds for this book will go to?

JG: 826CHI is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. Their services are structured around the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success.

826CHI provides after-school tutoring, class field trips to our location, writing workshops, and in-schools programs–all free of charge–for students, classes, and schools in Chicago. All of the programs are challenging and enjoyable, and ultimately strengthen each student’s power to express ideas effectively, creatively, confidently, and in his or her individual voice. Driving the mission home are more than 500 volunteers–the professional writers, teachers and artists, to name a few, who staff each and every program enables 826 CHI to serve 5,000 students annually with a small, efficient staff of four and an operating budget of about $282,550.

Anyone who has ever worked their way up from editorial assistant will have had to wrestle with the heap of unsolicited submissions at one time or another – and for the most part entirely fruitlessly. For if it’s true to say that everyone has at least one book in them, it can sometimes seem that this is exactly where these unwritten tomes should stay.

I’ve certainly done my time, sifting through everything from the diary of a cat (submitted as ‘non-fiction’) to a university thesis on African witchcraft – and have yet to discover any hidden gems myself.

And yet the publishing world is full of such legends — Man Booker winner D.B.C. Pierre was discovered on a slush pile, as were Tom Clancy, Martha Grimes and Val McDermid. As a result, we continue to believe in the possibility of that undiscovered work of genius with the same guilty optimism with which we once secretly believed in Father Christmas.

We spend hours, days, weeks, reading and responding to bizarre, ill-written and often utterly inappropriate submissions, and even longer trying to come up with better ways to do this – of which authonomy.com is one attempt.

There have always been detractors willing to suggest that we scrap the ‘slushpile’ entirely. But to do so would, I think, be a great pity.

Not because thousands of bestsellers currently reach us this way — evidence, alas, does not support this theory beyond a very few instances — but because the slush pile represents much of what I, as an editor, love about publishing. The fact that great books inspire other writers, the fact that anyone who is able and willing to pick up a pen or punch a keyboard can write (even if the quality varies wildly), and the fact that we all work with books because we love them.

Publishing is, undeniably, a business. But it’s also at heart a romantic undertaking — one inspired by a love of good writing, great stories, scholarship, insight and opinion. It is a lively, engaging and inspiring industry to work in, but it would not survive without the optimism of authors and publishers who believe in the potential of the books they publish – and importantly, all the books they have yet to discover.

And, of course, sometimes — very rarely — we do find things on the slush pile. The upcoming Comrade Jim (Fourth Estate, May 2008) was an unsolicited submission. Daniel Clay’s Broken, which HarperPress will publish in March, was discovered on the slush pile of the Curtis Brown Agency (for publishers aren’t the only fierce guardians at the gate — many agents won’t accept unsolicited submissions). In Daniel’s case, his ‘discovery’ came after almost a decade of working at a day job he loathed, writing at nights and on weekends and soldiering on through repeated rejections.

Over the next few months, Daniel will be contributing regularly to Fifth Estate, with articles on every aspect of the publishing process — from what it takes to keep writing when no-one it seems willing to represent you, let alone publish you, to signing with an agent, agreeing a publishing deal, surviving the editorial process and finally being published at home and abroad (Broken has also been signed by publishing houses in the US, Canada, Italy and Holland).

The aim of these articles is to inform and encourage, but also to introduce a writer from whom we expect great things. I hope you enjoy them.

Foreign correspondents seem to me a very particular breed, driven to take risks that would terrify most of us. It’s fascinating to try to imagine what impels them to war-torn countries, to immerse themselves again and again in the world’s most desperate and dangerous situations. The closest comparison I can imagine is to the mountaineers who doggedly threw themselves at the Eiger, dying in their droves, or the Arctic explorers who pitted themselves against terrifying expanses of remorseless ice and snow. Again, a different breed.

I’ve pasted below what Christina has to say on the subject, from the introduction to a book of her collected journalism that we’re publishing in July. Sobering stuff.

“The Plane to Kish Islands

Here is a typical morning in my life. It happens to be Sunday July 2nd 2006 and it is the day of my son’s seventh birthday party.

I arrived back on a plane early this morning from Afghanistan. At Heathrow I am one of the lucky people greeted by a name-board: for the first time ever my newspaper has arranged a car to pick me up. London has a grey hung-over gloom and St Georges flags droop forlornly from windows. The driver tells me that England was knocked out of the World Cup by Portugal the night before. Penalties, of course: I needn’t ask.

After dropping off my bags at home along with a bag of Starbucks croissants from the airport, and drinking my first decent cup of tea in a month, we drive to Sainsburys to buy ham and crust-less sliced bread. I have to make ham sandwiches for 20 seven-year-olds.

I make twice as many as anyone will eat, buttering slice after slice of bread with great purpose. Then I take them and a cool-box of drinks to nearby Palewell Park where we are having a football party.

Some of the children at the party are pointing at me and whispering. They have seen me on the news or the front page of the Sunday Times that morning and know that four days ago I was almost killed by Taliban — the “baddies” I hear one of them explain.

My mother is there, looking shocked, though I had phoned from Heathrow to warn her before she bought the paper. My husband, who is Portuguese, has said nothing.

This, after all, is what I do.

It is a sunny afternoon and I throw myself into arranging children’s drinks and ice creams and acting supremely unbothered. I want to keep hugging the blue-eyed birthday boy who I thought I would never see again but I know he will regard that as “embarrassment-making”. My phone beeps insistently with text messages — a bizarre mix of horrified concern from those who have seen the story in the paper and jokes about the state of my marriage after the Portugal-England match from those who haven’t.

My jeans and long printed smock are covering cuts, bruises, burns and thorns that I will still be picking out in six months. Some of them are infected and in a few days I will go to a local GP who will say “you have been in the wars” and I will laugh and let him assume I fell off my bike into a thorn bush.

Almost 20 years I have spent living on the edge. I have been pinned down by Russian tanks in a trench in Kandahar, narrowly missed a brick that smashed through my car windscreen on the West Bank, navigated through roadblocks manned by red-eyed drug-crazed boys with Kalashnikovs in west Africa, been kidnapped in the middle of the night by Pakistani intelligence, survived car crashes and emergency landings in planes held together by tape, and come under sniper fire in Iraq. All around me people have died. My life, I believe, is charmed.

Now I have come as close as possible to being killed. The British paratroopers, with whom I was ambushed, were so convinced we were about to be “rolled up” that they talked of saving their last bullets for themselves. In that ditch surrounded on all sides by Taliban with mortars, RPGs and Kalashnikovs, for the first time I really believed I would die. And I swore if I ever got out I would never go back.

Two months later, I will grab the bag with my flak jacket, helmet, medical kit and satellite phone and be back on a plane to Afghanistan.

Why do it? Every day I run away from that question.

I am not an alcoholic, a heroin addict, or from a broken home. I am a mother of a gorgeous curly-haired boy, wife of a loving husband, daughter of devoted parents, part of a close circle of friends… I have no excuses.

I could tell you it’s a search for truth. A hope that by exposing the evils and injustices of the world I can help make it a better place. Sadly, the pen is not that powerful or else the likes of Mugabe would not still be in power.

I could tell you that when I was a child I loved to read the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson and turn the sheets hanging on the washing line into doors onto faraway places. One of our neighbours had an apple tree that served just as well as Stevenson’s cherry tree for climbing up and looking “abroad on foreign lands”.

I could tell you that I felt suffocated by suburbia, living in a place called Carshalton Beeches where the only excitement was to go “up the wine bar” or “down the pub”. Adventure was missing the last train from London and having to take a series of night buses from Trafalgar Square.

I could tell you that I adored Hemingway and wanted to run with the bulls in Spain, watch big game among the green hills of Africa (though not hunt it), drink mojitos in bars in old Havana and find love behind the lines.

I could tell you that once you see others die and evils such as boys turned into killing machines with AK47s or families forced to bury stick-limbed girls because they could not afford HIV drugs, one’s own life becomes pretty insignificant.

I could tell you that there is nothing more exciting than getting on a plane to somewhere you have never been, particularly with a name like Bujumbura or Cochabamba. That used to be true but these days endless security queues have spoiled the magic of airports.

Maybe the truth lies in Dubai Terminal 2. That’s where you go to catch planes to the bad places. The destination board reads Kabul, Baghdad, Mogadishu and the airlines have names you’ve never heard of like Chelyabinsk, Don Air, Kam Air, Ossetia, Mahan air and Samara Airlines. These are airlines so dodgy that they are not allowed to land at the proper airport. Many, like Ariana Afghan airlines or Reem air of Kyrghistan, are on a list banning them from European airspace and describing them as “flying coffins”. Their planes are old Tupolevs bought second or third hand from Aeroflot or Air India.

The name, Terminal 2, makes it sound as if it is attached to the main airport but in fact it lies a half hour taxi ride away. It seems in another country entirely to that gleaming glass temple to capitalism where sunburnt passengers in shorts and mini-skirts shop for Rolex watches and Fendi handbags and buy $100 lottery tickets to win a Jaguar X-type.

At Terminal 2 there is just one shop and people stock up on Mars bars, tampons and biscuits for they know not what they will get the other end. Mostly they are bounty hunters, Afghan moneychangers, aid-workers, private security guards and journalists. Instead of smart shiny suitcases they have battered kitbags and rucksacks, black plastic crates of survival equipment, or, in the case of the Afghans, large cloth bundles. The ones with briefcases are consultants, being paid thousands of dollars for something called “capacity building”, but they will get on a special United Nations plane. Sometimes there are dead bodies being flown back from comfortable exile to be buried in harsh homelands.

Most people have grimly resigned expressions, particularly if like me they are flying Ariana. For the airlines of Terminal 2 departure times mean nothing and it is common to turn up day after day before a plane finally arrives. Besides we all know that the Ariana pilots prefer staying in Dubai than piloting their ‘coffins’ back to a destroyed country. We debate with those holding Kam tickets whether it’s safer to fly with an airline that has already crashed or one that always seems about to crash. Passengers that make a fuss and try to find non-existent airline representatives are exposed as newcomers.

Some might be committed do-gooders; others are only doing it for money. “George Bush has paid off thousands of mortgages”, says a Scottish ex-para on his way to be a $1000 a day security consultant in Afghanistan after a long stint in Iraq.

But there are a few that have a look on their face that I recognise. It’s a sort of suburban restlessness. Not in a grass-is-always-greener kind of way. But a search for adventure.

These are the people whose eyes light up when they see the name Kish appear on the destination board. Where is that? Kish islands in Iran, someone tells me. It sounds intriguing. I know I will try to go there. It will mean flying Kish air which last crashed two years ago.

Biographers of Alexander the Great used the Greek word pothos to describe his endless yearning to be somewhere else, whether it was to cross the Danube, go to the oracle of Ammon, sail the ocean, see the Persian Gulf or untie the legendary knot at Gordium.

I liked that description. But then I read that the longing for something unattainable expressed by pothos could also signify a desire to die. For pothos is also the name for delphiniums, the flowers that Greeks traditionally placed on someone’s tomb.

I never set out to be brave or daring or intrepid or any of those labels often attached to the phrase ‘war correspondent’. What I wanted to be is a storyteller. I have been lucky enough to live in countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe at a time of huge upheaval when the world was adjusting from the Cold War to a whole new war of terrorist attacks and suicide bombs.

To me the real story in war is not the bang-bang but the lives of those trying to survive behind the lines. This book then is not an attempt to answer the question why but just to present what I have seen as it is. Working for a weekly paper I have had the luxury of time to be able to go where other reporters don’t and tell the stories of those forgotten.

This then is a mixture of memories, articles (where possible the original rather than edited) and impressions jotted in notebooks and diaries. Sometimes the story behind the article is more interesting than what appeared on the printed page and where that is so I have tried to include that. These are my places of hope and despair.

Christina Lamb, London, March 2007″

It was established on the south bank of the Thames when the Romans build the first London Bridge and people have been trading on this site for over 2000 years. It’s a beautiful undercover food market and a truly wonderful part of London’s history.

We often visit the market for research, photography and feedback for our books, and many of our food writing authors, such as Nigel Slater, Giorgio Locatelli and Joanna Blythman are fans.

Some bright spark (I would use another term myself….) has decided to expand the railway line running through the roof of the market, which will also involve knocking down 23 of the beautiful listed and unlisted buildings in the closely surrounding area.

They already have planning permission , but are waiting funding and there is a strong local campaign to put a stop to it.

If you know and love the market in its present state, please sign the petition to prevent this from happening.

The plans, photographs and the petition are on the following: www.sabmac.co.uk

Unfortunately not a lot of people are aware of it so please sign it and pass it on to anyone else you know who loves this great bit of London heritage… AND LOCATION OF MONMOUTH COFFEE AND THE BEST MOZARELLA IN THE WORLD and that’s only two perfect things about Borough!