‘Please, I beg you. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.’
‘Mother dumped my father,’ a friend of my wife was saying one day, ‘all because of a pair of shorts.’
I had to ask. ‘A pair of shorts?’
‘I know it sounds strange,’ she said, ‘because it is a strange story.’
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‘I didn’t think she was happy; I thought she was in love, but I didn’t know what that told me, if it told me anything.’
Fiction by Jennifer Atkins.
‘She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest.’
Fiction by Sara Baume.
‘I could hear the sea, and I could hear my own name.’
Fiction by Eliza Clark.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
A story by Tom Crewe.
‘I don’t remember his face, nor him as a whole.’
Derek Owusu on fathers and family.
‘That was the setup for the review I wrote about this imaginary record.’ Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
‘What I’m talking about is a different sea, and different mountains.’ Haruki Murakami walks to his hometown after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.
‘I looked up at the sky. A few grey cotton chunks of cloud hung there, motionless.’
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘I looked back and there was something wrong about his hand – how it cupped her bottom, how it probed.’
