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The Cyrillic Alphabet

Adam Thirlwell

‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’

Lila.exe

Hari Kunzru

‘That smile. The start of all your problems.’

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.’

Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates.

Scouting for Boys

Paul Theroux

‘Three figures came single file over a wooded hill of the Fells carrying their rifles one-handed and keeping their heads low. They were duckwalking, hunched like Indian trackers, with the same stealth in their footfall, toeing the mushy earth of early spring. I was one of them, the last, being careful, watching for the stranger, his black hat, his blue Studebaker. Walter Herkis and Chicky DePalma were the others. When we got to the clearing where the light slanted through the bare trees and into our squinting faces you could see we were twelve years old.’

What Sheba Did Wrong

Zoë Heller

‘Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by the details—the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars.’

What the Sky Sees

Jon McGregor

‘This place that I have grown up in is a landscape of straight lines, a field of vision dominated by the parallel and the perpendicular.’

Marek Marek

Olga Tokarczuk

‘It hurt for no particular reason, just as the sun rises each morning and the stars come out each night. ’

The Way You Do It

Rachel Cusk

‘He merely desired to unpick her from the snag of what seemed vaguely to him to be her femininity.’

The Little Plate of Childhood

Todd McEwen

‘I truly hate food, I said to Isidor. I just can’t take it any more. F*** food!’

Give it up for Billy

Edmund White

‘Were there moral cataracts that one could remove?’

Several Anecdotes About My Wife

Gary Shteyngart

‘Fully clothed, we looked like your average young Brooklyn couple, second-rate hipsters in retro garb’.

Youth

J.M. Coetzee

‘There are two, perhaps three places in the world where life can be lived at its fullest intensity’

Soljas

Nik Cohn

‘He was light-skinned, almost honey-coloured. On the streets they called him Red.’

The Silence

Julian Barnes

‘Naturally the artist is misunderstood. That is normal, and after a while becomes familiar.’