“The Dancing Bear”
Maxim Loskutoff
“First, she was the sound of a breaking branch. A splintered knucklecrack shattering the quiet of these western Montana woods.”
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 84)
Excerpts
The Concrete
Daniel Abbott
"Isaac Page rides shotgun in a Chevy Cavalier. Backpack between his feet. The Grand River behind him.”
The Boatbuilder
Daniel Gumbiner
“One day garrett asked Berg to help him drop off Vespucci’s father’s canoe at the local boatbuilder’s shop. They loaded it onto the roof of his truck and drove north along the bay.”
Little Beast
Julie Demers, Trans. by Rhonda Mullins
“ 'You’re not a monster,’ Mother used to say. ‘Just a little beast.’ ”
In the Garden of the Fugitives
Ceridwen Dovey
“I drove from the farm into town this morning for my aerobics class, and became one among a legion of middle-aged women reflected in the mirror behind the instructor. ”
A View of the Empire at Sunset
Caryl Phillips
“Last night, after she had finished the red wine and then discovered where Leslie had hidden the bottle of whisky, she clumsily knocked over an empty glass and watched as it spiraled to the floor and smashed.”
Welcome to Lagos
Chibundu Onuzo
“Evening swept through the Delta: half an hour of mauve before the sky bruised to black. It was Chike Ameobi’s twelfth month as an officer in Bayelsa, twelve months on the barren army base.”
“After the incident with the power washer, I was determined to get my life together.”
White Ibis
Sam Pink
“My girl’s cousin came over. ‘Hey, y’all! Ch’all dewn?’ she said, striding in and setting down her massive key chain.”
It Needs to Look Like We Tried
Todd Robert Petersen
“The Jessup house in Anadarko, Oklahoma, was the last location on our shooting schedule.”
Slave Old Man
Patrick Chamoiseau, Trans. by Linda Coverdale
“The old man ran. He quickly lost his hat, his staff. He ran. Ran without haste.”
“Lover”
Melanie Rae Thon
"Dark in the dark, you come as stones striking glass. The girl you want to wake is awake. I am afraid for you.”
Miss Subways
David Duchovny
“She tried to avert her gaze from any man. She didn’t consider herself beautiful, but she had something some men sometimes liked. Some thing. Some times. Some men. Like she was in on the big joke.”
Rubik
Elizabeth Tan
“It’s Sunday evening and there’s nothing to eat. Elena’s bladeless fan pivots in monochrome silence, the centerpiece of a room that’s untidy in an engineered way, like movie teenage bedrooms.”
“Frank at the End of the World”
Tracy Daugherty
“A raindrop appeared in Bern’s right eye the night before his trip. A mote, a foreign object?”
Adjustment Day
Chuck Palahniuk
“Frankie’s dad told him that sometimes firemen need to burn down a bad house on purpose in order to save a good neighborhood.”
“The Coffin House”
Robert Aickman
“During the thirties Jessica Yarrow had found a publisher for no fewer than four volumes of verses, and the pleasant little parties in her studio had led to her being regarded with affection by many of the more subdued Bohemians; but now, it being 1941, she had been in the Women’s Land Army for nearly a year, and seemed to have only a single friend in the world, her resigned fellow-sufferer, Bunty Baines, daughter of a veterinary surgeon in Shropshire, and one to whom animals and the land seemed truly the order of nature.”
Nioque of the Early-Spring
Francis Ponge, Trans. by Jonathan Larson
“At every instant to have lost, to have to refind one’s vocabulary, to have to start over from the most common vocabulary, crude, down to earth, from the lack of vocabulary, nearly absolute, of farmers, of workers, of their badges, muddy, earthen blunder: look at what is good!”
The Optimistic Decade
Heather Abel
“It was April 1990, not even four months into the new decade, and already Nelson Mandela had been freed and Daniel Ortega defeated and the first McDonald’s opened in the USSR, which was about to drift apart, ending the Cold War, and still, although increasingly people chose to ignore this, everything was awful when it came down to inequality and Earth destruction and generally being fucked by capitalism.”
The President’s Gardens
Muhsin al-Ramli, Trans. by Luke Leafgren
“In a land without bananas, the village awoke to nine banana crates, each containing the severed head of one of its sons.”
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