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Now, Now, Louison

Jean Frémon

Jean Frémon on the artist Louise Bourgeois and her fascination with spiders. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen.

Occupation

Julián Fuks

‘They tell me you write about exile, about lives adrift, about trees whose roots are buried thousands of kilometres away, he said in his harsh accent, his hoarseness aggravated by the static on the telephone line.’

Oh, the Obvious

Christine Schutt

‘A wizened spring, the sickly prickly pear and organ pipe cacti were so riddled with holes they might have been targets.’

Our Lady of Mercy

André Alexis

‘I was engaged in a battle of politeness, those kindly – but ferocious – skirmishes that are so common in our country.’

Painter to the King

Amy Sackville

This is an excerpt from Painter to the King, Amy Sackville's account of the life of Diego Velázquez. Now available from Granta Books.

Parfait

Hiromi Kawakami

‘He comes all the way here after he died and the two of you are making small talk?’ New fiction by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell

Passage

Kevin Jared Hosein

Kevin Jared Hosein’s ‘Passage’ is the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner from the Caribbean. 

Perfidious Albion

Sam Byers

‘In terms of aspiration, leaving London was the new moving to London. You slogged it out, made a name for yourself, then decamped to the sticks and devoted yourself to trashing city life on Twitter while roaming the fields in pursuit of your tweedy ideals.’

Prime

Caoilinn Hughes

‘Miss Lynch teaches us such things. Things that are difficult to know.’

Rachel Reaches Out

Ben Pester

‘She hit send and sighed as the email-whoosh came through her headphones. Theo was sitting at his desk less than six metres away.’

Radical Sufficiency

Jess Row

‘We have to reverse-engineer our genius so that we can appreciate the simple things.’

Rainbow People

Nicholas Mosley

‘This journey around the outskirts of the Jungle went in a little and came out wondering, well that is not what I would have called a jungle.’

Regan

Brian Booker

A coming-of-age story about an awkward roommate on Roosevelt Island, ordering bisexual porn tapes from catalogues and writing summaries of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet for a living.

Sharing the same bed, dreaming different dreams

Ma Jian

Ma Jian shows the excess and corruption of the Chinese Communist party in this excerpt from his new novel, China Dream, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew.