Tatiana Salem Levy

‘It’s never easy to trade one love for another.’

Lillian Li

‘Like romantic love, you can’t ever replicate your first best-friendship.’

Noémi Lefebvre

‘One piece of luck: I didn’t explain to the pianist how to play the piano.’ Translated from the French by Sophie Lewis.

Juhea Kim

‘Always being pulled in opposite directions was how she remained upright.’

Issue 33

Ryszard Kapuściński

‘There is a demonstration on the other side of La Paz.’

Issue 118

David Long

Guadalupe Nettel

‘Bonsai have always prompted a kind of fear in me, or at least a puzzling discomfort.’

Helen Oyeyemi

‘A golden chain was fastened around her neck, and on that chain was a key.’

Issue 123

Helen Oyeyemi

‘I didn’t enclose a note, though there were a few things I’d have liked to say. Restraint is classier.’

Issue 127

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.’

Diana McCaulay

Winner of the 2022 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region.

Ben Lerner

‘Things he dreamt began to show up in the bushes, the plastic figurine from a parachute firework, the small dull rusted circular saw blade he thought of as a throwing star, and he pocketed those things.’

Ottessa Moshfegh

‘I stay mostly in my bedroom chambers, examining what has found its way into my pores or the mucoid crook of my eye.’

Alicia Kopf

‘My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there.’