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from Son of the Morning

Joyce Carol Oates

‘The livingness of the rifle and the bullet and the death spasm and his own bright quickening blood: never would he forget.’

Requa-I

Tillie Olsen

‘Night scratched at the window and seeped from the room corners. No other sound but rising river wind.’

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.

A Double-Income Family

Deepti Kapoor

When Mrs Mehra leaves Delhi she retires in one of ‘the vast new satellite townships on the eastern fringes of the metropolis’.

A Fan Letter

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.’

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Duncan McLean

‘I thought I heard the woman next door crying’

A Hebrew Sibyl

Cynthia Ozick

‘And so began what I was to become. To all these things – the admonitions and the testimonies, the rites and the annunciations – I had easily acquiesced.’

A Killing

Katherine Faw Morris

COKE SMELLS COLD AND CHEMICAL LIKE THE INSIDE OF A REFRIGERATOR. It’s what back then smells like, now when she thinks of it.

A Life Where Nothing Happens

Mazen Maarouf

‘His fear was that we would die in front of him and so he thought of us all the time, which is not what he wanted.’

Fiction by Mazen Maarouf.

A Light Bird

Maylis de Kerangal

‘Her voice survived her, in recorded form, indestructible, in the form of a light bird.’

Fiction by Maylis de Kerangal, translated by Jessica Moore.

A Mason’s Hand | New Voices

Ali Akbar Natiq

‘Haji sahib, these kids are beyond me. I can’t teach them any more. Please make some other arrangement.’

A Mother’s Dilemma

Victor Lodato

‘I can hear the girl scratching a pencil inside a notebook. I don’t like it. I’ve asked her not to write about me.’

A Queer Streak Part One: Anonymous Letters

Alice Munro

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

A Queer Streak Part Two: Possession

Alice Munro

‘He thinks he remembers Violet coming for supper, as she sometimes did, bringing with her a pudding which she set outside in the snow, to keep it cool.’