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The Last Rite of the Body

Sophie Mackintosh

‘My ex-boyfriend dies, and we all gather to put our hands into his body.’ New fiction from Sophie Mackintosh.

The Spread

Ben Lerner

‘He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him.’

Read an extract from Ben Lerner’s latest novel, The Topeka School.

Innards

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene

‘To pick the right heart, the old man said, you had to look for depth in the ruby, to prize a raw intensity of colour and a bright gold fat blanketing the angry muscle.’

Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova

Haruki Murakami

‘That was the setup for the review I wrote about this imaginary record.’ Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

Providence

Sara Majka

‘It’ll always come to this, I said, laying my head on your shoulder.’

Vows

David Means

‘True love is, when seen from afar, a big fat cliché.’

Beetle

Joanna Kavenna

An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.

My Mother Pattu

Saraswathy M. Manickam

Saraswathy M. Manickam’s ‘My Mother Pattu’ is the Asian regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

A Season on Earth

Gerald Murnane

‘He had forgotten in the seminary how many distractions there were in the world.’

The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing circa 1989

Amanda Lee Koe

‘In the day, his bevy of besotted rustics were coached in maxims of libertarian socialism. By night: rice wine orgies and folk punk sing-alongs.’

Rules for Visiting

Jessica Francis Kane

‘It wasn’t until the end of dinner, when my aunt started clearing and my grandmother demanded another bottle of wine, that I began to understand.’

American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit

Noor Naga

‘Question: is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?’

Evensong

Todd McEwen

‘Characteristically my wife refused to be drawn into the situation while I became obsessed with it.’

Agnes of Iowa

Lorrie Moore

‘Through college she had been a feminist – more or less. She shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.’