Liars' League

Throwing Heavy Leather by Lauren Frankel

July 12 Throwing Heavy Leather

Read by Sabina Cameron

Dakota grew up with girls like this one – all crooked and uneven beneath the smooth. Like the ones who watched her at school while she made hand shapes at her desk – braiding her fingers together to make a cave, a church, a smiling cat. Later, they jumped her in the hall and Dakota got beat. All the kids whooping and shouting, same as this crowd now, only Dakota can’t hear. As soon as the bell rings, there’s only two people in the world. This girl and Dakota. Crooked vs. Smooth.

 

How to Survive the Olympics with a Broken Heart by Rosalind Stopps

 July 12 How to Survive the Olympics

Read by Nicky Diss

Buy a box of man-size tissues, the softest ones you can get to stop your nose from getting sore. 

Make a wall chart, a huge one detailing every heat of every event of the Games, complete with tiny flags.  Take special care to cover up all the photos of happier times stuck up there like blu-tacked evidence.

Exhibit A - a picture of you and Charles on Brighton beach last summer, licking ice creams in an ironic, postmodern way.

Exhibit B - same suspects but snapped by the Christmas tree where you made festive love later and got pine needles in your knickers.  Note that Exhibits A and B are underneath the marathon event section of the gigantic and slightly messy chart and smile ironically as you open the box of tissues. 

 

Mesquite by Jessica Roth

 July 12 Mesquite

Read by Sarah Feathers

By the time I knew what a boy was good for, my family had left upstate New York for a place out west where nothing rots too well and even the fence posts bleach like bone. The hills around our new house were studded with prickly pear and a cactus some mean somebody decided to call ‘teddy bear.’ Shade was hard to come by. Although we’d moved to Wintersburg, it seemed like winter never came. Not like the ones I’d known, anyway. No snow to silence the low hum of a place. No salt on the roads to rust paint off the cars.

 

Skin Deep by Michelle Shine

July 12 Skin Deep

Read by Claire-Louise Amias

I sit on the balcony of a holiday apartment, five stories up, looking out to sea. Tom sits at my side with his hair gelled into spikes and a small tattoo of me on his right upper arm. He brushes his lips with the back of his hand and wipes something away from the outer corners of his eyes. I catch him looking my way then averting his gaze.

I have my legs straight out in front of me resting on a sun-lounger; there is a blanket over them. They are alien; white, translucent, marbled with deep blue veins. My toes are sticking out, nails painted scarlet. I let out a long and mournful sigh.

 

If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.

The H-Meister Hits Thirty by Quintin Forrest

July 12 The H-Meister Hits 30

Read by Tom Sawyer

Twenty-seven, then. It isn't quite the big Three Oh, things aren't that bad yet. But all the same, that red-ringed sign on the highway of life seems around the next corner. So I suppose it depends what a chap's been up to, all this time. But if it may look, to the untrained eye, as if all he's been doing is having a wild, crazy time in Whisky Mist, Boujis and in some ways the military, then it's probably time for a couple of changes.

Time to slow down at parties, and speed up at work. Well, all right, 'work', but you get the idea. Time to think about marriage, one's health and one's future. Time to develop a couple of interests, polo, the environment, underprivileged kids. Time, in other words, to start trying to plan the next Royal wedding.

 

Sweat & Tears next Tuesday 10th July!

The results are in! And this Olympic month we have five hot, sweaty and sometimes sad stories for you, involving sexy sea-girls, heartbroken sports fans, female boxers, torrid Arizonan teens, and Prince Harry on a blind date in Nando's. You could miss it, but frankly your only other option would be watching London 2012 on telly, so we strongly advise you to BE THERE!

Date: Tuesday July 10th

Time: Doors at 7pm, show starts at 7.30

Tickets: £5 on the door

Venue: Downstairs at The Phoenix, Oxford Circus.

RSVP to the Facebook event here.

STORIES CHOSEN:

Throwing Heavy Leather by Lauren Frankel *NEW AUTHOR* 

Skin Deep by Michelle Shine *NEW AUTHOR* 

How to Survive the Olympics with a Broken Heart by Rosalind Stopps

Mesquite by Jessica Roth *NEW AUTHOR*

The H-Meister Hits 30 by Quintin Forrest

We will also be laying on the usual book quiz (win posh hardbacks and the new issue of Granta), discount wine and general merriment, so we hope to see you downstairs at the Phoenix next Tuesday!