The Unknown Known
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Mother Care
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘After the birth and the overnight in the hospital she didn’t go downstairs for a week.’
Doctors and Nurses
Blake Morrison
‘Skirtless, jumperless, she lies on the floor, her hair settling about her like a silky parachute.’
I Am Here
Brian Hall
‘We knew almost nothing about her before she was born, not even her sex, so we must have referred to her as “it”’
Salford, 1924
Leila Berg
‘Yesterday two boys got hold of me in the playground and banged my head against the wall over and over and said “Why did you kill Jesus?”’
Hazleton Public Schools, Pennsylvania
Judith Joy Ross & Liz Jobey
‘Growing up is learning how to take a stance, before the camera and before the world.’
Sluts
Susan Swan
‘It was Tom’s contention that you could spot a slut by the colour of her complexion.’
He’s One, Too
Allan Gurganus
‘In Falls, North Carolina, in 1957, we had just one way of “coming out”. It was called getting caught.’
Eternal Love
Karen E. Bender
‘After Lena and Bob were married in the Chapel of Eternal Love, Ella told them that new husbands and wives were not allowed to share a hotel bedroom.’
The Last Jews in Warsaw
Abraham Brumberg
‘I paid only one visit to the Jewish cemetery before the war, sometime in the spring of 1939. I was twelve years old.’
Integration
Sherman Alexie
‘Anonymous cries up and down the hallways. Linoleum floors swabbed with gray water. Mop smelling like old sex.’
Looking for the General
Madison Smartt Bell
‘Midday, and the sun thrummed from the height of its arc so that the lizard seemed to cast no shadow.’
Orno and Marshall
Ethan Canin
‘Marshall was unlike anyone Orno had ever met before. He was able to converse with Mr and Mrs Pboson as though he was of their own generation.’
The Revenant
Edwidge Danticat
‘Doctor Berto came with a new stethoscope to check Victoria’s heart. He was shocked to learn that she had died.’
Burning Mary
Tom Drury
‘Paul Emmons was a college student with no money behind him and none in front and so he seemed immune from trouble.’
Birthday Boy
Tony Earley
‘During the night something like a miracle happened: Jim's age grew an extra digit.’
The Speed of Sperm
Jeffrey Eugenides
‘I was born twice: once, as a baby girl, at 4.53 a.m. on a remarkably unpolluted Detroit day in 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in the offices of our family physician, Dr Arnold Philobosian, in 1976.’
Apples
David Guterson
‘He remembered the new, fresh, orchard country of his youth and the rows of apple trees his father had planted on the east bank of the Columbia River.’
Slips of Love
Allen Kurzweil
‘He gripped a paint roller in one hand, a bucket in the other, and was covering the month's graffiti with gray latex.’
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.’
