The Poker
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All That Was Familiar
Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
The story of two women fleeing Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria.
Consolata
Nuala O’Connor
‘Daddy always said our apples were blessed because the order lived beside us. He liked to gift crates of Egremont Russets, the sweetest of all his fruit, to the sisters.’
Eli Goldstone | Five Things Right Now
Eli Goldstone
‘The closest I come to meditating is sitting in front of a tumble dryer with a dead magazine.’
Strange Heart Beating
Eli Goldstone
‘Grief is the aggressive displacement of the self from a known universe to another.’
Between Them
Richard Ford
‘It was my child’s outlook to think most things were right. And yet if life’s eternal drama is of events seeking a more perfect state, their life and mine was not that.’
Roma
Deborah Levy
‘Her husband who is going to betray her is standing inside the city of Roma.’ Dreams of infidelity from Deborah Levy.
A Wooden Taste Is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste Is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste Is the Word For
Jesse Ball
‘My friends, what I mean is, this life is shallow like a plate. It goes no further.’
The New Me
Halle Butler
‘But I feel sure. Making some decisions today, no doubt about that! Not thinking about certain things today, no doubt about that!’
Los Angeles
Emma Cline
‘It was only November but holiday decorations were already starting to creep into the store displays.’
Uri
Joshua Cohen
‘There’s just no way, unassisted, to commit suicide. But then there’s no way to be just a human, isolated, stripped or just stripped of contexts – because even a cell must have a floor, a ceiling, walls.’
Trump Sky Alpha
Mark Doten
‘Mr President, we can get you into a bunker with full communication equipment and you can give your address there, you just can’t do it in a goddamn plastic blimp at the start of World War III.’
Revolutions
Jen George
‘Small praise was like a drug for party members, though we used real drugs too, hard ones, drugs that imbued one with the facility for ruthless violence and multiple orgasms.’
Day 4
Rachel B. Glaser
‘She sat sweating on the curb as her mother’s narrow face hovered over the parking lot like a hologram.’
Yport
Lauren Groff
‘She pokes her head through the skylights and sees the tide far out, the exposed seabed sinister as the surface of the moon. Tiny people pick their way across.’
Leaving Gotham City
Yaa Gyasi
‘I can’t remember the last time we said I love you before hanging up the phone. I can’t even remember the last time we said goodbye.’
The Meat Suit
Garth Risk Hallberg
‘All life is suffering. At the zendo where Jolie went Thursdays after sixth period, not much in the way of portable wisdom got dispensed, but this was, near as she could tell, the through line.’
Country & Eastern
Greg Jackson
‘Anyone could find courage when the World-Historical Spirit had selected you to enact your martyrdom on the Six O’Clock News. But in the shadows, in secret, unrecognized?’
Remembering Westgate
Sana Krasikov
‘I wonder if the only way to grasp what is terrifying and unimaginable for those of us who haven’t experienced it is to feel around the contours of inescapability, the boundary of its negative space.’
The Answers
Catherine Lacey
‘And each time I hit the tarmac I had this terrible feeling that the trip I’d just taken had never even happened, that I’d spent hundreds for a memory I could barely recall.’
Bright Circle
Ben Lerner
‘Things he dreamt began to show up in the bushes, the plastic figurine from a parachute firework, the small dull rusted circular saw blade he thought of as a throwing star, and he pocketed those things.’
The Anthology
Karan Mahajan
‘Long before terrorism became fashionable in the West and commonplace in the East, there was a bombing at the Sovereign Center in Delhi.’
Lipari
Anthony Marra
‘Frank Laganà stood on the cliff suited in black, as straight as an exclamation point, poised to leap to his death once again.’
This Is Our Descent
Dinaw Mengestu
‘When it came to our son, her defensive instincts were well-developed and all the more necessary because it was hard from the outside to see why we were so protective.’
Brom
Ottessa Moshfegh
‘I stay mostly in my bedroom chambers, examining what has found its way into my pores or the mucoid crook of my eye.’
All the Caged Things
Chinelo Okparanta
‘All that thought of home gave the girl a sickly feeling, the longing of something so out of reach, something she wasn’t even sure she could any longer truly remember.’
What Terrible Thing It Was
Esmé Weijun Wang
‘Dennis with his bespectacled eyes on his phone, performing the act of emotional multitasking. While I’ve been psychotic, he’s been phone banking.’
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
Claire Vaye Watkins
‘The uncooperative cadence of the phrase my myspace page perfectly encapsulates the awkwardness of the early oughts when our story begins.’
Terra Nova
Robert Moor
Robert Moor remembers hitch-hiking across Newfoundland: ‘The way to pronounce Newfoundland, Bill and Sue instructed me, is to remember that it rhymes with understand.’
Last Days on Corfu
Amelia Gray
A novel about the life of celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan. ‘You can feel her in every room. The chandeliers shiver.’
