The Dependents
Katharine Dion
"His wife had died in June and there was to be a memorial service for her in two weeks, at the end of the summer."
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 83)
Excerpts
Brother in Ice
Alicia Kopf, Trans. by Mara Faye Lethem
"First it was the tabular icebergs, which appeared floating in the local pool. Narwhals got in through a crack in the tiles at the bottom."
Confessions of the Fox
Jordy Rosenberg
"Some time ago—never mind how long precisely—I slipped off the map of the world. I took the manuscript with me."
The Traitor’s Niche
Ismail Kadare, Trans. by John Hodgson
"The unblinking eyes met the stares of the passersby and tourists who poured into the square from all directions."
“Across the Street”
Lee Martin
"The idea was to let their adult son live on his own. After years of group homes and institutions and finally time spend in their care, his parents—he an inventor, and she a dour, nervous woman—purchased a two-story house on Bay Meadows Court and helped their son move into a subdivision just inside the outer belt with its constant noise of traffic."
History of Violence
Édouard Louis, Trans. by Michael Lucey
"On days when I felt calmer I would imagine myself picking out someone I didn’t know in some public place, on the sidewalk or in the aisle of a supermarket, and telling them my whole story, everything that had happened."
Southernmost
Silas House
“The rain had been falling with a pounding meanness, without ceasing for two days, and then the water rose all at once in the middle of the night, a brutal rush so fast Asher thought at first a dam might have broken somewhere upstream.”
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
“Sonja’s sitting in Folke’s office. It took a long time to get here, as she kept taking detours.”
“Gatlinburg”
Nick White
“We heard about the bears almost from the moment we arrived in the mountains.”
Who is Vera Kelly?
Rosalie Knecht
“On a Tuesday I came home from school to an empty house, watched the evening news, and then took two Equanil caplets lifted from my mother. Nothing happened, so after an hour I took three more, and then maybe more after that, I can’t remember.”
“Much Heat, Little Light”
Machado de Assis, Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
“At the time, Luís Tinoco was twenty-one. He was of medium height, bright-eyed, tousle-haired, inexhaustibly loquacious, impetuous, and passionate.”
Visible Empire
Hannah Pittard
“In the first few hours, confusion. The numbers kept changing. The French were saying 121 dead, which meant—according to the manifest—there must be 11 alive.”
Upstate
James Wood
“First he would have to go and see his mother. He would tell her—something about Vanessa, not everything of course.”
Rivers
Martin Michael Driessen, Trans. by Jonathan Reeder
“'If you have to drink, then do it someplace where it won’t bother anyone,' his wife had said.”
“Free Will for Free”
Giordano Meacci, Trans. by J. Bishop
“For Her it was no small problem, to respond to his wish in light of what she could fathom of it: to understand the request without even being clear on what a 'man of her life' might be.”
“Your Mother Was a Fish”
A.M. Homes
“À l'oeuvre on reconnaît l'artisan. You can tell an artist by his handiwork.”
“Alfalfa”
Terese Svoboda
“The year I lick so much LSD off stamps I have to use Elmer’s glue to back the twenty-center for a postcard cash request to my mother, that I am alive note at the end of term, is the year of all the 'wine' parties.”
T Singer
Dag Solstad, Trans. by Tiina Nunnally
“Singer suffered from a peculiar sense of shame that didn’t bother him on a daily basis but did pop up occasionally; he would remember some sort of painful misunderstanding that made him stop short, rigid as a post, with a look of despair on his face, which he immediately hid by holding up both hands as he loudly exclaimed: 'No, no!' ”
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