Milkman
Anna Burns
"The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died."
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 77)
Excerpts
“Greta”
Faruk Šehić, trans. Mirza Purić
"We traveled through time and space till cosmic silver started to nestle in our hair."
All the Lives We Never Lived
Anuradha Roy
"In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman. The man was in fact German, but in small-town India in those days, all white foreigners were largely thought of as British. This unconcern for accuracy annoyed my scholarly father even in circumstances as dire as losing his wife to another man."
“An Exotic Marriage”
Yukiko Motoya, trans. Asa Yoneda
"“He says his ex-wife’s been sending him strange garbled emails recently,” I said. We’d found a table in the seating area of the department store’s food hall. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation."
A Ladder to the Sky
John Boyne
"I had noticed the boy earlier, a young man of about twenty-two carrying drinks to the tables, for he was very beautiful and it seemed that he had been glancing in my direction as I drank my wine. A startling idea formed in my mind that he was drawn to me physically, even though I knew that such a notion was absurd."
Katz or Cats, or How Jesus Became my Rival in Love
Curt Leviant
"For a moment I raised my eyes from the manuscript I was editing and looked out the streaked plate glass (New Jersey Transit doesn’t do windows either) at the drab towns racing by, on their way to some unknown western destination. A man sat next to me. I didn’t look at him but I saw his well-pressed, superbly tailored trousers and Gucci loafers on his stretched-out feet."
“Love is the Sky”
Andre Dubus
"The November sun was distant and the sky hazy pale blue and, although it was not two o’clock yet and the Scottish Highlanders were still doing their pre-game show on the field, the afternoon seemed to be fading into evening. Curtis Boudreaux was not watching the Highlanders."
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants
Mathias Énard, trans. Charlotte Mandell
"Night does not communicate with the day. It burns up in it. Night is carried to the stake at dawn. And its people along with it—the drinkers, the poets, the lovers. We are a people of the banished, of the condemned."
Come with Me
Helen Schulman
""I’m game,” she said. “I’m in.” She pushed her sunglasses up onto the top of her head. The super-bendy photochromic lenses were constructed out of something called NXT, which had been invented by the army. Designed for battle, this pair was also great for trail running, deflecting slingshotting branches from scratching her eyes out, and mitigating the rapid-fire one-two shock of shadow and blazing sunshine during high-intensity sprints in the woods."
Prague Spring
Simon Mawer
"It started in a pub. Not unusual for a journey. Phileas Fogg started his at the Reform Club in London, but then James Borthwick was not Phileas Fogg, and this pub was the nearest thing to a club that James knew."
“The Houseguest”
Amparo Dávila, trans. Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson
"I’ll never forget the day he came to live with us. My husband brought him home from a trip."
From Adderall to Opioids, the Personal Side of an American Tragedy
On the Silent Spread of a Nationwide Killer
“One Ton Prop”
Christopher Kang
"My plays have nothing to do with performance. The stage is just a place. I do not have actors. I have strangers who collaborate with me to make a new confusion in harsh light while other strangers hide in the pitch-black darkness."
“Love Story”
Yu Hua, trans. Allan H. Barr
"The autumn of 1977 left a mark on two young people. On a day when the sun was shining they boarded a clattering bus and traveled to a town twenty kilometers away. It was the boy who bought the tickets, while the girl took cover behind a concrete utility pole some distance from the station."
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