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In the Village

Derek Walcott

‘I came up out of the subway and there were / people standing on the steps as if they knew / something I didn’t.’

Frogs

Mo Yan

‘Once the preposterous reality set in, we were overcome by sadness.’

Give it up for Billy

Edmund White

‘Were there moral cataracts that one could remove?’

A Thousand Splendid Stuns

Morwari Zafar

‘More important than anything else that fateful year was the life-defining transcendence of Peter Gabriel.’

Persian Love

Alan Warner

‘It is 6:22 of what beauty and life's joy there is to extract’

Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual

Evie Wyld

‘In the year before my first period, my mother gives me a book called Woman’s Body, An Owner’s Manual.’

In The Tunnel

John Wray

‘It was a question of not thinking about what you were doing.’

The Barracks Thief

Tobias Wolff

‘What sort of a man would turn his back on his own kind?’

Tomorrow, upon Awakening

Antônio Xerxenesky

‘He more than anybody else needs to define his symbols for the year to com.’

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike

Edmund White

‘The freedom conferred by masks. Children and current wives cannot blame you for what your characters do and say.’

Handkerchief

Ghassan Zaqtan

‘Nothing’s left to say between us / everything went / into the train that hid its whistle.’

Notes from New York

James Wolcott

‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’

Once Was Dark

Josh Weil

‘When he opened his eyes, she was looking out at the rooster, the sun-blasted concrete, the railing thinned to brittle by the brightness.’

Barrenland

A Yi

‘I no longer feared that she would entrap me; my heart would not soften.’