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The New Music
Donald Barthelme
‘Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.’
Monster Deal
Frederick Barthelme
‘I'm about ready to go see what’s happening when they come in, each of them carrying a flamingo from the front yard.’
Green, Mud, Gold
Sara Baume
‘She shuts her eyes and pictures ears growing out through her ears, her spine turning to wood, pictures herself as a girl-woman scarecrow, arms opened wide, and nailed to two posts in the centre of a great green, mud and gold expanse, crucified.’
Anecdotes
Ann Beattie
‘Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different, with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger, and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago.’
The Indian Uprising
Ann Beattie
‘Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don’t believe there’s a poem in anything any more, maybe I’ll write a story.’
Lady Neptune
Ann Beattie
‘The word money popped up like a bit of the ocean’s detritus riding in on a wave, but her lips formed the words ‘Merry Christmas’.’
Taken Out of Context
Paul Beatty
‘I’d never been in a room full of black people unrelated to me before.’
Five Parties
Ned Beauman
‘The second year, I noticed before anyone else that the Coelophysis was trying to escape.’
Glow
Ned Beauman
‘Growing up, you got so used to all your secrets being sad or shameful that you came to assume they were, like alkyl halides, intrinsically neurotoxic, and now he had learned for the first time that they weren’t.’
The Wall
Jurek Becker
‘That afternoon a different soldier is standing at the gate. He calls out something that sounds dangerous.’
Looking for the General
Madison Smartt Bell
‘Midday, and the sun thrummed from the height of its arc so that the lizard seemed to cast no shadow.’
Rabbit Cycling
Madison Smartt Bell
‘He’d lost her first name in a burst of senseless coloured lights and he couldn’t tell her his own name because he didn’t know it.’
