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Skinned Alive
Edmund White
‘Once in a very great while he referred to me playfully as his ‘husband’, despite his revulsion against camp.’
Old Man Potchikoo
Louise Erdrich
‘But Potchikoo claims that his father is the sun in heaven that shines down on us all.’
The Murderee
Martin Amis
‘This is a true story, but I can’t believe it’s really happening. It’s a murder story, too. I can't believe my luck.’
Drinking Men
Todd McEwen
‘Consider a long and famous river; it teems with salmon and story, winds majestic through the most various of Scotland's shires.’
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
Angela Carter
‘Silence and space and an unimaginable freedom which they dare not imagine.’
The Ivory Acrobat
Don DeLillo
‘She lay in a kind of timeless drift, a mindwork spiral, carried on half-formed thoughts. She passed into a false sleep and then was listening again. She opened her eyes.’
The Apprentice
E. L. Doctorow
‘And there was no resistance, I saw a movement of black bulk, that was all, and all I heard was maybe the sound someone makes who is frightened and has a hand not his own over his mouth, the doors slammed and the car was humming and gone and the boat was already opening up water between itself and the slip before a thin minute had passed.’
Victory Mills
Mona Simpson
‘I have driven a car on acid, carried my mother drunk upstairs and slept with numerous men and one woman to no consequence.’
The Business
Jay McInerney
‘So I said to Dalton, “No, no, I meant–what's the secret of a great screenplay?” And he said, “It's very simple, Lex. Three acts–first act, get man up tree, second act, shake a stick at him, third act, get him down from the tree.”’
Feet
Seamus Deane
‘That was my first death. When the priest tossed the first three shovelfuls of clay on to the coffin, the clattering sound seemed to ring all over the hillside graveyard and my father's face moved sideways as if he had been struck.’
Orion
Jeanette Winterson
‘Every 200,000 years or so, the individual stars within each constellation shift position. That is, they are shifting all the time, but more subtly than any tracker dog of ours can follow. One day, if the earth has not voluntarily opted out of the solar system, we will wake up to a new heaven whose dome will again confound us.’
The Miracle at Ballinspittle
T. Coraghessan Boyle
‘This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finbarr Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch.’
