Issue 97

Jonathan Safran Foer

‘Her heart is kept in a room with a very expensive security system.’

Issue 7

Maggie Gee

‘They're only wild flowers. I wish I could buy you real roses. But to her they became the real roses, frail petals, each centre a sun. And they smelled of sun and beginnings, as clear and thin as the water.’

Joanna Hershon

‘This is where my imagination had gone: frittered away on longing and regret, just like everybody else.’

Harley Hern

Harley Hern’s ‘Screaming’ is the Pacific regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

Tim Fitts

‘Fred was the type whose worldview gazed through a shadow of things that could go wrong, like most of the South Philly lifers.’

Tessa Hadley

‘We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love. We’d both had dry husks for our hearts, that day.’

Daisy Hildyard

‘The sexual activity was dense and rapid everywhere that he was not.’

Ma Jian

Ma Jian shows the excess and corruption of the Chinese Communist party in this excerpt from his new novel, China Dream, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.

Alan Hollinghurst

‘The first boy I was in love with was called Mark Lyle.‘

Sarah Hall

‘Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed.’

Issue 130

Anjali Joseph

‘Like scraps of leather, oddly shaped, things from life, people and sayings and objects, found themselves spliced together.’

Anjum Hasan

Issue 35

Nadine Gordimer

‘She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’t go a step nearer.’

Issue 129

Miranda July

‘No one knows why ripping up a name makes a person call – science can’t explain it. Erasing the name also works.’