Explore fiction
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.’
Domain
Louise Erdrich
‘Seven corporations control the afterlife now, and many people spend their lives amassing the money to upload into the best.’
Some Heat
Miranda July
‘No one knows why ripping up a name makes a person call – science can’t explain it. Erasing the name also works.’
The Ferryman Is Dead
Saša Stanišić
Here, more die than are born. There’s a refrigerator at the bottom of the lake. The ferryman is dead. No one is coming to take his place.
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.’
Blasphemy
Fatima Bhutto
The tourists are gone. They’ve fled to Islamabad, along with the landlords and the hoteliers and the battalions of police that used to defend them, and certainty has left with them.
The Alphabet of Birds
S.J. Naudé
‘She is standing there, her body like a lamp, waiting for the glass to break.’
Books and Roses
Helen Oyeyemi
‘A golden chain was fastened around her neck, and on that chain was a key.’
Ghosts
Brian Hart
‘The road pleasantly gained and lost elevation, flood gauges in dry washes and scraggy hilltops, corners that begged for two wheels not four.’
The Blood Drip
Brian Evenson
‘They had stumbled upon a town and tried to approach it, but had been driven off with stones.’
The Argentine Episcopate
Bernard Quiriny
‘I started working for the Bishop of San Julián in 1939, not long after the death of my husband.’
Relic Light
Eric Gamalinda
‘Unconfirmed stories that have been retold so often they acquire the polish of truth, like the rosary beads people here carry in their pockets and pull out whenever the need for reassurance arises.’
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.’
Zoraida
Tanya Rey
‘Desire was a slapping, bone-chilling wind the likes of which did not exist this close to the equator.’
Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing
Yukiko Motoya
‘But the customer had already been in the changing room for three hours.’
The Family Friend
Julia Franck
‘We’ve got a lot of family friends but Thorsten has been coming round far too often recently and I wonder whether I shouldn’t tell her that sometime.’
The Love Machine
Julia Elliott
‘Beatrice was my first love. The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy.’
Jill
Darcey Steinke
‘I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags.’
Exotics
Callan Wink
‘He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving.’
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.’
Grandma and Me
Thomas McGuane
‘Barring weather or a World Series game, on Sundays I’d pick up a nice little box lunch from Mustang Catering and take Grandma some place that smelled good.’
The Mast Year
Diane Cook
‘Sounds like a mast year . . . it’s a thing that happens to trees. But sometimes it happens to people too.’
Mirage
Claire Vaye Watkins
‘He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present.’
Girl on Girl
Diane Cook
‘Marni on Mack. Mack in Marni. A little Mack and Marni. My head rushes. I want to watch, hear the sounds.’
Quarter Past Midnight
Marie-Helene Bertino
‘Flute-like, gauze-filled, late-afternoon sunshine. Rainbow bracelets on the carpet. They use their tongues to wet their lips. Girls.’
Once Was Dark
Josh Weil
‘When he opened his eyes, she was looking out at the rooster, the sun-blasted concrete, the railing thinned to brittle by the brightness.’
Smartening Up
Aoko Matsuda
‘‘Let’s become monsters together,’ she said, looking straight into my eyes.’
