Sharona Muir

‘A baked mermaid, prepared, a la Julia Child, with her tail obtruding from her open mouth, and her little fried fingers presented on a mother-of-pearl comb. How would that strike you?’

Aoko Matsuda

‘‘Let’s become monsters together,’ she said, looking straight into my eyes.’

Issue 81

Andrew O’Hagan

‘The men were quiet. They said nothing for a minute and the sea at my back was calm and almost imaginary, but you could hear the waves coming to wash the chalk cliffs from under us.’

Issue 51

Blake Morrison

‘Late June, scorched grass and sprinklers, the sky as if scuffed and beaten. Too hot to work, too lazy to think.’

Issue 29

Rian Malan

‘Some ten miles beyond the last white town, you cross the border between the First and Third Worlds, between white South Africa and black kwaZulu.‘

Issue 86

Jonathan Lethem

‘Writing about Cassavetes feels like vocalese: putting lyrics to passages of jazz improvisation.’

Issue 114

Nami Mun

‘They were too tired to have affairs.’

Dina Nayeri

‘Now it seemed that the rest of life was only a bright, eye-burning white expanse, like the sun-bleached concrete slabs just outside this building.’

Issue 75

Norman Lewis

‘In the 1930s I wanted to travel and I wanted to write. In 1935, I published my first book—about a journey to Spain’.

Issue 54

Stewart O’Nan

‘Before I begin I'd like to say that I'll try to remember everything as best I can, though sometimes I know it won't be right.’

Alice Munro

‘She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgement had deserted her.’

Fiction by Alice Munro.

Issue 59

John McGahern

Kyoko Nakajima

‘On the boat none of them will know who will meet them where they go. This is the world, they say to themselves. There is no need to worry. And this part is true, as worry functions were never built in.’

Jonathan Lee

‘I heard the news from a nurse with a piece of tinsel tied around her waist: my father had become a hypochondriac.’