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The Husband Stitch
Carmen Maria Machado
‘I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.’
River So Close
Melinda Moustakis
‘She’s a good-for-nothing chummer. If she survives a week on the slime line without cutting off her thumb or slicing her wrist, she’s hired.’
Final Fantasy III
Tao Lin
‘On the F train to Manhattan I emailed a friend in the UK. I said I couldn’t write my essay about Japan.’
Thank You for Having Me
Lorrie Moore
‘Every day there was something new to mourn and something old to celebrate.’
The Chronicle of the Wrinkled-Face Sheikh
Salman Natour
‘No other inanimate object retains emotion as strongly as keys do. Fingerprints are engraved on them as if the laws of wear and tear do not apply.’
Small Differences
Catherine Lacey
‘Everyone should just sit very still until they reach the calmer waters of later-young-adulthood, that promised land of lowered expectations.’
A Clean Marriage
Sayaka Murata
‘Frequency of sex since marriage: zero.’ Sayaka Murata on a sexless marriage and the ‘Clean Breeder’ technique for pleasureless reproduction.
Kinder Than Solitude
Yiyun Li
‘Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities.’
Breakfast
Toshiki Okada
‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’
Japan Lights
Sarah Moss
‘She kneels and bows her head almost to the floor, as if pretending he’s one of her idols.’
