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Excerpts

Rabbits for Food

Binnie Kirshenbaum

"December 31, 2008. All too often paper hats are involved. Other things about New Year’s Eve that mortify Bunny are false gaiety, mandatory fun and that song, the one that’s like the summer camp song. Not “Kumbaya,” but that other summer camp song, the secular one, where everyone links arms and they sway as they sing, “Friends, friends, friends, we will always be.” It’s not that song either, but the New Year’s Eve song also requires arm linking and swaying and it sentimentalizes friendship with an excessive sweetness that is something like the grotesquerie of baby chicks dyed pink for Easter."


All the Land

Jo Lendle, translated by Katy Derbyshire

"It was early morning when Georgi woke them. An unreal, magical light came down through the ceiling. Wegener put on his passably dried clothing—the cloth trousers, the ironed vest, dogskin trousers, his thick, stuffed fur boots, the skiing shirt, the blue sleeveless cardigan. After a breakfast of shark in bread soup, Wegener tended to Loewe’s wounds one last time. Small pieces of bone had festered out over night. As they had no more bandages, he plucked the splinters out of the gauze with tweezers and reused the material."


The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

Juliet Grames

"Stella Fortuna the Second’s earliest memory is of the day she almost died for the first time, the episode with the eggplant. Most of us have memories from when we are three or four years old—often foggy, impressionistic, colors or words instead of whole, solid moments. Stella had none of these. Her first memory was vivid, complete, and late: she was four and a half, and she was waking up in a shadowy brown room redolent with the sweet-rot smell of mint. She was in intense pain."


Beyond Babylon

Igiaba Scego, translated by Aaron Robertson

"Ernesto is now a number. He had a face, hair, beautiful hands. He laughed, sucking up air like a century-old combustion engine. He was a good boy. Better than me. And now he is a number on a list of thirty-thousand desaparecidos who never came home."


Disappearing Earth

Julia Phillips

"Sophia, sandals off, was standing at the water’s edge. The bay snuck up to swallow her toes. Gray salt water over bright skin. “Don’t go out any farther,” Alyona said.The water receded. Alyona could see, under her sister’s feet, the pebbles breaking the curves of Sophia’s arches, the sweep of grit left by little waves. Sophia bent to roll up her pant legs, and her ponytail flipped over the top of her head. Her calves showed flaking streaks of blood from scratched mosquito bites. Alyona knew from the firm line of her sister’s spine that Sophia was refusing to listen."


Lanny

Max Porter

Robert said I should try again to offer Pete some money. We argued about it.He brought it up at a dinner party with Greg and Sally. Tell me, he said, is it or is it not weird that Mad Pete is giving free art lessons to Lanny?


Strangers and Cousins

Leah Hager Cohen

"Clem wakes today, three days before her wedding, much as she does every morning: impatient for her life. Impatient to make her entrance in it. Standing on the threshold of what Mantha would call Future Life. The Main Act. She feels the impatience as a physical sensation. In her fingers, mostly, a king of distant throbbing, as if she had a build-up of sap in her veins and it needed to flow."


America Was Hard to Find

Kathleen Alcott

"He had never described his wife, but Fay knew who Elise was the moment she folded her hands on the bar. Something essential changed about a person, Fay thought, when they belonged fully to someone else, as particular as a color. A certain softness in the shoulders, a diminished curiosity that came from no longer performing for potential futures. She was disgusted by it, she was envious."


Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World

Lucy Ives

This isn’t anyone’s autobiography. What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.These are the two terse sentences Clare Elwil has been writing for the past ten weeks.


“Guns Are Safer For Children Than Laundry Detergent”

Miriam Cohen

He had a gun. There was a gun in the house. A gun a gun a gun.


The Unpassing

Chia-Chia Lin

The days were rapidly lengthening; I could barely remember the spun-out dawns and twilights of winter. But although the nights were short, they felt long and wild. We had rearranged the beds again, each one against a different wall, and Pei-Pei and I were sleeping with our heads pointed to the same corner.


China Dream

Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew

"The instant that Ma Daode, director of the newly created China Dream Bureau, wakes from his snooze, he discovers that the adolescent self he has just dreamed about has not disappeared but is standing right in front of him. It is an afternoon in late spring, and he has been dozing in his swivel chair, his shoulders hunched over and his pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat."


The Archive of Alternate Endings

Lindsey Drager

When I am young and don’t know much about the way lives curl and coil around each other and that we call this love, I ask my brother why he does not want the lips of girls. We are playing in the sandbox, that liminal space where other worlds are encouraged to open. He looks at me and I cannot break the stare. Our castles in the wet sand fall apart.


Juliet the Maniac

Juliet Escoria

"Nicole bought the switchblade when she went down to Tijuana with her mom and dad. They’d let her go off by herself as long as she was back when she’d promised. She pretended to go shopping for dresses but instead went to the nightclubs, where Mexican girls not much older than us blew whistles loud in her face, dumping cheap tequila down her throat. She pretended to swim but instead bought things you couldn’t here, pills that made us sleepy but not high, and, of course, that switchblade. It looked exactly like a joke switchblade I’d had as a kid, one that was actually a comb. Same black and silver handle, same plastic switch, just as flimsy and cheap looking. But the blade was heavy, pale and cold like the moon."


Upright at Thyatira

Darrell Kinsey

Long ago in my reading, I came across a term, a single word, used to describe the phenomenal blending of voices that can occur when close blood relatives sing together.


“Flag”

Ha Seong-nan, trans. Janet Hong

The power went out late last night, at ten past midnight. While people were still sleeping, the electrical appliances stopped working. The children who woke were cranky; they missed the hum of the refrigerator and the whir of the fan, sounds as comforting to them as a lullaby.


If I Had Two Lives

Abbigail Rosewood

"We started to plan our escape. Exactly what prompted our decision, I wasn’t sure, only we didn’t like that the old black and blues on our bodies didn’t fade completely before new ones were pressed on top of them. We started to fear that if we stayed, our skin would eventually turn a dark purple, an ill-fitting shade for us both. Boyfriends would be nearly impossible then. The beatings, different in the way they were administered and in the reasons why, looked the same on our skin."


She is Our Stupid

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

My sister Biira is not; she’s my cousin. Ehuu! Ever heard of King Midas’s barber, who saw the king’s donkey ears and carried the secret until it became too much to bear? I could not hold it in any longer.


The Polyglot Lovers

Lina Wolff, trans. Saskia Vogel

"Borges writes that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both cause the population to multiply. That assertion probably shows a comprehensive goodwill toward nature, because humankind as a creature, at least as seen from above, seems by and large destructive, craven, and detestable. In this it most resembles, at least according to the author Roberto Bolaño, a rat. But contrary to Borges’s view, mirrors were, for Marco Devoti and I, the summer he and Max Lamas visited us, more than a way to multiply ourselves—which we thought formidable in and of itself—but also a way to multiply the pleasure of what we eventually undertook in my little bedroom."


“Nazan the Cleaning Lady”

Selahattin Demirtaş, trans. Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson

"That Renault station wagon you see over there, it’s from our neighborhood—and so are all the guys inside it. They’re Halime Teyze’s boys. The one at the steering wheel is Yusuf, he’s the oldest. Three of the others are his brothers, and next to them is cousin Muhittin, and that little squirt in the back is Muhittin’s son, Süleyman. They do fancy plastering on ceilings, that’s what all the stuff in the back is for. They make a fine team and work like demons—but the work’s never steady."


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