House Fire
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Martin Amis
‘Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.’
The Spelling Bee
Neil Steinberg
‘Jacob spells ‘idiosyncratically’ and nods at the ‘That is correct,’ as if to say, ‘Damn right that is correct, lady.’’
Trap. Dominate. Fuck.
Julian Barnes
‘Sceptics maintain that live chess is as enthralling as watching paint dry. Ultra-sceptics reply: unfair to paint'.
Never Let Me Down
Susan J. Miller
‘The statement was the truth of him–not only what he said, but also the fact that he would say it to us, and say it without guilt, without apology, without regret'.
The Up Escalator
Bret Easton Ellis
‘I'm standing on the balcony of Martin's apartment in Westwood, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and Martin comes towards me, rushes at me, and with both hands pushes me off the balcony'.
Fiction by Bret Easton Ellis.
Buddy Carmody
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘No one was safe walking to church in the dark, but Buddy knew better than to beg not to go'.
Patricide
Beverly Lowry
‘By now, the shooting is old news, and Rush Springs, Oklahoma, has had its five minutes of notoriety’, Beverly Lowry in 'Patricide'
The Tragedy of Vukovar
David Owen
’The three month siege of Vukovar, in the autumn of 1991, when an average of 5,000 shells a day landed on the city, set a pattern for events in the former Yugoslavia.’
The Fall of Vukovar
Jean Hatzfeld
'Jean Hatzfeld returned to the former Yugoslavia and was severely wounded by gunfire in June 1992'.
Hero of Tiananmen Square
Orville Schell
‘The spring of 1989 was so apocalyptic that at the time it had seemed unthinkable that the year's events would fade or that China would ever be able to forget them.'
Progress in Prague
Ivan Klíma
‘People in the West are aware of the hardship and bewilderment that accompanied the political and economic transformation of central and eastern Europe after 1989.'
Dick Contino’s Blues
James Ellroy
‘June 22, 1958. Dig, hepcats: it’s me, five minutes after the fuzz told me my mother had been murdered.’
Hard Man
Hugh Collins
‘My da, I say, is the famous Wullie Collins. He's the Robin Hood of Scotland. He takes from the rich and gives money to the poor. My da’s a bank robber.’
Blind Rage
Henry John Reid
‘I was born in Dundee on 3 April 1951, of a mother who was not meant to bear more children and a father who had long before disappeared.’
Glasgow Victim
Hugh Barnes
‘I went to Glasgow to live out a fantasy. Its fluid, inconstant, nerve-wrung landscape had a claim upon my imagination.’
Crime in the City
Andrew Savulich
Andrew Savulich’s photographs of crime in New York City for Granta 46: Crime.
The Penitenitary
Tim Willocks
‘A million man-years of confinement had burnished the surface of the granite flags to a greasy smoothness ingrained deeply with filth and despair.’
Local Man has Sex with Corpse
Allan Gurganus
‘RALEIGH–A former funeral home employee charged with having sex with a body he was transporting pleaded guilty Wednesday after a psychiatrist testified that the man had sexual problems and that the incident probably was an isolated one.’
Foreign Bodies
Peregrine Hodson
‘We'd reached the end of the journey: a day and a night and then home. Perhaps that was our first mistake. We forgot where we were.’
Dizzy
Paul Auster
‘The method’s not important. The only thing that counts is that you go along with it – and that you understand why it has to be done.’
Fiction by Paul Auster.
The Getaway Lunch
Tibor Fischer
‘I found a seedy hotel not far from the station, where you would expect to find one.’
The Black Sheep
Italo Calvino
‘And then one day – nobody knows how – an honest man appeared.’
Fiction by Italo Calvino
Newcastle
Ian Hamilton
‘My first sighting of Paul Gascoigne was in 1987, when he was playing for Newcastle.’
World Cup Hero
Ian Hamilton
‘The antitheses had been there all along but in July 1990, after Gascoigne’s World Cup triumph, they were given a new formulation.’
Don’t Cry for Gazza
Ian Hamilton
‘‘Who is Gazza?’ asked Mr Justice Harman in the High Court in September 1990.’
Actively Portly
Ian Hamilton
‘When Ian Rush was asked to explain his failure to score goals for Juventus he replied that being in Italy was like being in a foreign country.’
Finally Fit
Ian Hamilton
‘By eight-thirty, the rain was sheeting down, and the thunder and lightning seemed to be directly overhead. The police dogs around the track began to bark. Were lions whelping in the street? Had Gazza been too saucy with the gods?’
Il Commento Gastrico
Ian Hamilton
‘In the old days, when a British star went to Italy, he disappeared.’
Portly Again?
Ian Hamilton
‘English football’s most precocious and precious talent is evaporating into the skies over Italy like the fading flares of a half-spent Roman candle.’
Mississippi Water
Jonathan Raban
‘I flew to Minneapolis, rented a car and followed the river downstream for a thousand miles.’
Batorsag and Szerelem
Ethan Canin
‘In January of 1973, the year everything changed in our family, my older brother Clive competed for the mathematics championship of William Howard Taft High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio.’
