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Brother in Ice

Alicia Kopf

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

Car Concentrate

Etgar Keret

‘Women mostly touch it tentatively with the backs of their hands.’

Careless

Hiroko Oyamada

‘As I lay on the mattress, the white toe pads of the gecko floated up before me, against the vastness of the blue-black night. Rather than a presence, it seemed to me more like a trace, a barely discernible odour that flooded in on the air.’

Dancing for the Avatar

Kō Machida

‘If I let myself sink down into this I’m never coming back up.’

Dengue Boy

Michel Nieva

‘Where his mother had surely hoped for a sweet little mouth, Dengue Boy had misshapen flesh bristling with maxillary palps.’

Fiction by Michel Nieva, translated by Natasha Wimmer.

Earthlings

Sayaka Murata

An excerpt from Earthlings, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

Eight Trains

Alberto Olmos

‘To go is always to go somewhere; returning, you return to nowhere. That’s the way it is.’

Enoki

Aoko Matsuda

‘Without any forewarning or explanation, people suddenly began visiting. They came in droves to find her.’

A story by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton.

Faith

Sayaka Murata

‘Hey, Nagaoka, wanna start a new cult with me?’

New fiction by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

From the Left Bank of the Flu

Misumi Kubo

‘The big road looked to me like a river, the cars rushing by as if carried along on its current.’

Fyodor Denisovich Konstantinov

Lev Ozerov

‘A piece of boxwood, gripped in a vise, / waits on the workbench for his knife.’ Poetry by Lev Ozerov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, and introduced by Robert Chandler.

God Bless You, 2011

Hiromi Kawakami

‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.

Grief’s Garden

Caroline Albertine Minor

‘I imagined his journey out of the coma as an increasingly painful ascent through dark water.’ Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight.

Imperium

Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński, once the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, on the concept of borders.