The Adulterants
Joe Dunthorne
“Throughout our twenties, nobody in our friendship group had been willing to admit they wanted to procreate. It was a shameful, secret pursuit, like skiing.”
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 88)
Excerpts
The Break
Katherena Vermette
“Ziggy is fucking frozen all the way through by the time they finally find the party, by the time she and Emily get the nerve to open the door to the old rundown house that thumps with bass and rattles with people.”
Whiskey & Ribbons
Leesa Cross-Smith
“Frances was fucking her heart out on top of me. Cursing, wild-eyed. This was the picture I had in mind whenever anyone would ask me why we were still together. This is why we’re still together.”
Love
Hanne Ørstavik, Trans. by Martin Aitken
“In his school bag is a book of raffle tickets for the sports club. When he’s finished his dinner he’ll go around the houses he can see in the photo to sell some tickets.”
Song of a Captive Bird
Jasmin Darznik
“June of that year was a month of martyrs and bloody days. In answer to the cries of 'Down with the shah!' and 'Down with imperialism!' the holy city of Qom had been set ablaze.”
“Anything You Might Want”
Anjali Sachdeva
“Every time Michael told Gina about how he had become her father’s debtor—the old man’s slave, he always said—the story changed a bit.”
“O’Hare”
Kate Braverman
“After martial arts and gymnastics, we have nature hiking with the botanist. The botanist is usually a graduate student from Santa Cruz or Davis, who reiterates, with each brittle leaf, desiccated seedpod, and severed insect leg or wing, that she isn’t a certified expert.”
A Long Way from Home
Peter Carey
“Mrs. Bobs did not know the first thing about me, for instance that I was a chalk-and-talker, recently suspended for hanging a troublesome student out of a classroom window.”
The Radicals
Ryan McIlvain
“A quarter only got you ten minutes here, but I supposed we’d been lucky to find a parking spot at all. Lower Manhattan, late September. The air studiously neutral, at last emptied of the humid frenetic energy that had made of the city a kind of particulate snow globe in the last few weeks.”
“Her Native Tongue”
Lynne Sharon Schwartz
“A certain woman never felt entirely comfortable speaking her native tongue. She spoke ably enough; her vocabulary and grammar were adequate to say all she needed to say, but she didn’t feel at home either in her mind or in her mouth.”
“Our Fathers at Sea”
Michael Andreasen
“The night before we load you into the crate and watch as the helicopter carries you off to the undisclosed location to drop you into the Atlantic Ocean, we eat dinner as a family.”
This is Memorial Device
David Keenan
“Findlay and Alan were brothers and they lived with their parents, who were teachers, in Kenilworth Drive, just up from the old Kenilworth Hotel. They were eccentric kids. At the age of fourteen Findlay subscribed to Newsweek and Alan was a practising magician who, he claimed, had been initiated into a coven of witches that practised out of Katherine Park at night.”
Some Hell
Patrick Nathan
“Two days before their father shot himself, Heather foretold her brother’s death. By then, Colin was old enough to not believe her, to not fall for every lie or story.”
Winter Kept Us Warm
Anne Raeff
“Postwar Germany was rife with opportunities, and Ulli soon found her place in the postwar economy.”
Asymmetry
Lisa Halliday
“Alice was beginning to get very tired of all this sitting by herself with nothing to do: every so often she tried again to read the book in her lap, but it was made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs, and no quotation marks whatsoever, and what is the point of a book, thought Alice, that does not have any quotation marks?”
Freshwater
Akwaeke Emezi
“This is all, ultimately, a litany of madness—the colors of it, the sounds it makes in heavy nights, the chirping of it across the shoulder of the morning.”
“The Fallguy’s Faith”
Robert Coover
“Falling from favor, or grace, some high artifice, down he dropped like a discredited predicate through what he called space (sometimes he called it time) and with an earsplitting crack splattered the base earth with his vital attributes.”
“Fractal”
Joyce Carol Oates
"At eleven, the child was into fractals. Naturally then, the mother agreed to drive him to the Fractal Museum in Portland, Maine—'The Singular Museum of Its Kind.'”
The Friend
Sigrid Nunez
“Mostly he ignores me. He might as well live here alone. He makes eye contact at times, but instantly looks away again. His large hazel eyes are strikingly human; they remind me of yours.”
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