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To Feed the Night

Philip Hensher

‘They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties.’

Moscow Dynamo

Victor Pelevin

‘That's why they're able to live like normal human beings, he thought, because they never forget about their duty. They don't spend all their time getting pissed like folks here.’

Peter Truth

Charlotte Hobson

‘Petya Pravda's dead. He died forty days ago, as elongated and translucent as an icon.’

The Coincidence of the Arts

Martin Amis

‘Round about, a thousand conversations missed a beat, gulped, and then hungrily resumed.’

Destroyed

Hilary Mantel

‘What an awful death, I said to myself. Smirking, I said, what a destruction.’

A short story by Hilary Mantel.

We Are the Kings

Michel Houellebecq

‘Smoking cigarettes has become the only element of real freedom in my day-to-day existence.’

A Sentence of Love

Assia Djebar

‘I met Annie for the first time in 1995, in Algiers. A friend of my sister's, she came from Paris and stayed with me for one night.’

Fort-de-France

David Macey

‘In an hour or so, the bats will fly during a brief twilight. And then the tree frogs will begin to chirp in the dark ’

The Rat

Patrick Chamoiseau

‘Fort-de-France, at that time, had not yet declared war on rats. Along with the crabs, they inhabited the crumbled sidewalks and canals of the city. ’

Night in the Afternoon

Caroline Lamarche

‘A little entrance hall. A staircase. To the left of the staircase, a door with a window leading into the concierge's room.’

Don’t Forsake Me

Ivan Klíma

'Bára went to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression', Ivan Klíma in 'Don't Forsake Me' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.

Make Him Sing

J.M. Coetzee

‘He expects astonishment and sympathy; instead he gets mirth.’

Lover

Joyce Carol Oates

‘You won't know me, won't see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.’

The Vulgar Soul

John Biguenet

‘She got skinny and became a clairvoyant. And she wasn't even a stigmatic.’