conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Trying to Save Piggy Sneed about Charles, Dickens.This with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Humor.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Here is a treat for the author addicts and a perfect introduction to his work for the uninitiated.To open this spirited collection, the author explains how he became a writer.There follow six scintillating stories written over the last twenty years ending with a homage to Charles Dickens.This irresistible collection cannot fail to delight and charm.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
  The most famous child cripple in fiction is still wringing hearts'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
  The most famous child cripple in fiction is still wringing hearts. "His active little crutch was heard upon the floor," Dickens writes. Indeed, we can hear Tiny Tim's crutch tapping today.
  Of his travels, Grass writes that he "loyally wrote 'writer' on the profession line of [his] immigration card. A profession with a long tradition, if the word was really in the beginning. A fine, dangerous, presumptuous, dubious profession that invites metaphoric epithets. An East German apparatchik, a Chinese Red Guard, or Goebbels in his day might have said what Franz Josef Strauss, leaving his Latin on the shelf, said a year ago in German. Writers, he said, were 'rats and blowflies.'"
  Of himself and Schlöndorff, Grass remarks: "What did we drink to? Since our glasses were often refilled, we drank to contradictions, to the repeatedly contested truth, naturally to the health of the people (whoever they may be), and to the white, still-spotless paper that clamors to be spotted with words. And we drank to ourselves, the rats and blowflies."
  Grass also knows how to be harsh. Of his character Dörte: "Now that she wants a child — 'This time my mind is made up!' — she has been tiptoeing on religious pathways. With Balinese women she offers up little flower-patterned bowls of rice in temples under holy trees, in each of which a white, fertility-bestowing woman is said to dwell." On the other hand, she stops sleeping with Harm ("I haven't got to that stage yet'").
  Of Dörte and Harm's whole generation, which is my generation, the student-protest generation: "They have found themselves knee-deep in prosperity-determined consumption and pleasureless sex, but the student protest phase left sufficient imprint to keep the words and concepts of their early years available to them as an alternative, as something they can relapse into wherever they may be sitting or lying."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Grass had already said that if Germany unified too quickly — without certain careful stages (in preparation for the devastating changes) — there would be rioting against foreigners, and renewed right-wing extremism; and Grass asked, wisely, what could possibly alleviate the anticipated bitterness of the greatly disadvantaged new citizens from the East... about 17 million of them. In essence, he was saying SLOW DOWN!
  Just as Günter Grass is capable of out-imagining history, he will outlast his critics — just as snails make their own progress, and toads go on crossing the road.
  To them, there was comfort in a mob, for a mob can drown out any single voice. It is inevitable that we writers take no comfort from a mob. A mob always wants to go too fast. Our method is moving slowly and speaking at length, like snails and toads.
  I'm looking forward to seeing him — this time especially, because I have a story to tell him. It's a true story — about meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane.
  I was taking an Air France flight from Toronto to Paris. Everett and Janet were seated across the aisle from me; my seat companion was an elderly woman with a disturbingly deep cough. She had a refined German accent and a face of patrician detachment, of unending wisdom and constraint; with hindsight, this should have been all that was necessary in order for me to recognize her father in her, but I was misled by the only name that was printed on her boarding pass, which she repeatedly turned face-up and face-down, like a playing card, on the armrest between us. The name on her boarding pass was Borgese — she was a German who'd married an Italian, I supposed.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The matter of a suitable title for this story will doubtless be an ongoing subject of conversation between Günter Grass and me; naturally, I plan to take the tape recording of Claudio's nosework with me to Behlendorf in September. Grass is a much more symbolic writer than I am; he is a more subtle writer, too. I imagine him thinking that "The Right Hand" — in reference to the side of the keyboard that Claudio plays — would be both the symbolic choice and the most subtle title. But there's very little that's symbolic and even less that's subtle about me. From now on, whenever I tell the story of meeting Thomas Mann's daughter on an airplane, I am calling the whole adventure "Claudio's Nose."
  But there is sad news in Elisabeth's most recent letter: Claudio has passed away. "There won't be another dog like Claudio," Elisabeth concludes. Now when I play the tape, it seems unsuitable for dinnerparty entertainment; I like to listen to it alone.
  The other night Everett heard the minuet by Mozart, and then the pieces for children by Schumann and Bartók. "What are you listening to, Daddy?" he asked me.