A long, slow, ear-hurting rip of thunder, as lightning splits the black sky.


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Jane Austen’s novel ‘Northanger Abbey’ was published posthumously in 1818. Martin Amis adapted it for Miramax Pictures in 2001. The film has yet to be made. This is how it begins.
A long, slow, ear-hurting rip of thunder, as lightning splits the black sky.
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Martin Amis's books include Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow and Lionel Asbo. He was one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1983.
More about the author →‘Round about, a thousand conversations missed a beat, gulped, and then hungrily resumed’.
A satire on fundamentalism in this extract from an unpublished manuscript.
‘Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.’
‘Your shoulder blades still jolted to the artillery of the Russians as they scurried eastward.’
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