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Kinder Than Solitude
Yiyun Li
‘Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities.’
To Detroit
Benjamin Markovits
‘Things started going wrong at my ten-year college reunion – or I guess I mean that I realized how wrong they had gone.’
Soft Core
Joyce Carol Oates
‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who'd had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister's company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie's breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.’
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.’
My Heart
Semezdin Mehmedinović
‘Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.’ Translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth.
Breakfast
Toshiki Okada
‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’
Five Cats and Three Women
J. Robert Lennon
‘While he didn't mind (not much anyway) being responsible for the death of one cat, his cat, he did not feel good shouldering the death of four cats.’
Reference Points
Philip Kerr
‘It was eating oysters, four hundred of the bivalve sons-of-bitches, that finally killed my father, in a theatre-bar off St Martin's Lane.‘
