In the Country
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The Giant of Cape Cod
Elizabeth McCracken
‘People think they’re interesting. That’s their first mistake.’
Farewell
Fae Myenne Ng
‘If Grandpa Leong had been a family man, there might have been real tears, a grieving wife draped in muslin, the fabric weaving around her like burned skin.’
Maximum Security
Robert O’Connor
‘Hot and hopeful under the May sun, air crinkling above the highway. Except my Ford Escort didn't care for the heat and flatlined a few hundred yards from home.’
Moscow, Idaho
Chris Offutt
‘Tilden stopped digging and wiped his sleeve across his forehead, leaving a brown smear on his skin.’
A Fan Letter
Stewart O’Nan
‘Before I begin I'd like to say that I'll try to remember everything as best I can, though sometimes I know it won't be right.’
The Driving Child
Mona Simpson
‘Staring out at the endless gray, Mary wrote a letter to her mother and told her she'd named the baby Jane, the name she'd years ago given her only doll.’
Xmas, Jamaica Plain
Melanie Rae Thon
‘I’m the one who got away, the one you don’t know; I’m the long hairs you find under your pillow, nested in your drain, tangled in your brush.’
Future Shock
Kate Wheeler
‘Althea's neck strained. Her black, small eyes shifted swiftly, blinked, then fixed evilly on Ingrid.’
Interesting if True
Phillip Knightley
‘The end of the war in the Pacific came just before I left school.’
Brand Leader
Fintan O’Toole
‘It was a clear, uncomplicated space, a brand image, a label that could be stuck on a billion sauce bottles.’
Full Disclosure
Zoë Heller
‘The speech he gave was bellicose. It was time, he told the people in the conference room, for them to pull their socks up.’
Two Dead in Car Blast
Lynda Schuster
‘I can write about this now only because enough time has passed.’
Here Come the Tanks
Patrick Wright
‘In these civilian circumstances, unhampered by any opposition from aircraft, landmines, artillery or other tanks, the tank seems unstoppable.’
TV is Good for You
Dan Jacobson
‘Television is constantly accused of encouraging apathy, sloth, passivity, illiteracy, mindlessness and docility among those who are addicted to watching it.’
The Trial
Gordon Burn & Tom Pilston
‘There are constants in the media landscape, the images that, even half-seen, alert us to another excitingly dire occurrence.’
Taken Out of Context
Paul Beatty
‘I’d never been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before.’
The Lawyer’s Story
Paul Theroux
‘Bow tie, blue shirt, tight suit, cowboy boots—he was overdressed for Singapore.’
The Butcher of Bermondsey
Graham Swift
‘Then he led me out into the noise and the glare and the stink.’
Meat Country
J.M. Coetzee
‘It is eccentric not to eat meat in the United States, doubly so in Texas.’
People Eaters
Joan Smith
‘In 1777, a butcher's assistant from Cheshire, Samuel Thorley, was tried for murder at Chester Assizes.’
Aphrodisiacs I Have Known
Norman Lewis
‘In the winter of 1957, I went to Liberia for the New Yorker.’
The Sins of the Flesh
Margaret Visser
‘The message that vegetarianism imparts to the rest of us is ascetic and exclusive.’
A Mystery
Charles Jones
‘Charles Jones took beautiful photographs of vegetables, fruit and flowers.’
Do Women Like to Cook?
Laura Shapiro
‘Until recently, the question 'Do women like to cook?' wouldn't have been asked and couldn't have been answered.’
What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat
Chitrita Banerji
‘Spring in Bengal is teasing and elusive, secret yet palpable, waiting to be discovered.’
Frozen Fish
William Leith
‘I remembered the freezer from when we were kids. It had been important to us then, the site of many shameful boyish deeds.’
Toffee
Agnes Owens
‘"Bloody well wake up!" Maureen's mother called to her -daughter, who slept in the kitchen bed recess.’
Stringhoppers
Romesh Gunesekera
‘In 1956, my father was thirty-nine years old. He didn't even know how to boil an egg.’
First Catch Your Puffin
Sean French
‘A man is rescued after years stranded on a desert island with two companions, one of whom died.’
