The Mercy Seat
Elizabeth Winthrop
“When Lane comes out of the gas station store, the dog is waiting for him. It sits in the dusty crossroads, alert and eager, ears pricked and black tongue stiff between its panting jaws.”
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 92)
Excerpts
Dictionary Stories
Jez Burrows
“The English language has over five hundred thousand words, but John didn’t say a word all the way home.”
“The Village Idiot”
Majidah al-Outoum, Trans. by Alice Guthrie
“We awoke one morning to news of a death. The person we had lost was the one we used to call the Village Idiot—that buffoon who used to make us laugh and cry at the same time, that leaping, dancing ball of energy who would hurl himself around, wild with enthusiasm, stomping on our toes and crashing into us as he went gesticulating by.”
Indian Horse
Richard Wagamese
“Two essential things,” he said. “Always keep your stick on the ice and always keep your legs moving.”
Lawn Boy
Jonathan Evison
“When I was five years old, back when my old man was still sort of around, I watched a promotional video for Disneyland that my mom got in the free box of VHS tapes at the library.”
Animals Eat Each Other
Elle Nash
“A week after the Wal-Mart incident, we were all hanging out at their apartment in the evening. Frankie was making dinner, the baby was napping. Matt and I sat on the couch, alone for the first time.”
“Out There”
James Kelman
“I had to do something new. My way of operating was not so old yet I seemed to have forgotten how to do anything else.”
The Changeling
Joy Williams
“There was a young woman sitting in the bar. Her name was Pearl. She was drinking gin and tonics and she held an infant in the crook of her right arm.”
The Comedown
Rebekah Frumkin
" What had been happening in Diedre’s life prior to the summer of 1985, the month of July, when he drove up to the Shell where she worked in his 1976 green Ford Pinto, dressed in resort-owner pants and a guayabera, pupils massive behind a pair of expensive-looking Ray-Bans?”
America Is Not the Heart
Elaine Castillo
“It’ll take you a long time to talk about martial law, and you’ll never talk about it with anyone who lived through it with you. But for now, you don’t go to the rallies, you don’t join the student protests; you go silent or change the subject when someone at your table in the canteen brings it up.”
Waiting for Tomorrow
Nathacha Appanah, Trans. by Geoffrey Strachan
“Anita is sitting, or rather crouching, hugging her upraised legs, head lowered, forehead resting on her knees, inhaling her own warm vanilla scent.”
Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else
C.D. Rose
“A few years ago, following the modest success of a book I had edited, I was invited to give a series of lectures at a university in a small and somewhat remote city in central Europe which I shall not name.”
Woman of the Ashes
Mia Couto, Trans. by David Brookshaw
“Mother says: Life is made like string. We need to braid it until we can no longer distinguish its threads from our fingers.”
“Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs”
Gerald Murnane
“I first read part of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in January 1961, when I was aged a few weeks less than twenty-two years. What I read at that time was a single paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way.”
Blue Self-Portrait
Noémi Lefebvre, Trans. by Sophie Lewis
“The pianist’s entrance is always a big moment, I had expected this moment to be a big one and I wasn’t disappointed.”
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky
Jana Casale
“Karole kaner had been one of Leda’s favorite professors. She was an aloof woman who wore indefinable writerly clothing (Is that a vest or a robe or just a dress maybe?).”
The Chandelier
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards
“Before falling asleep, concentrated and magical, she would say farewell to things in a last instant of lightly illuminated consciousness. She knew that in the half-light 'her things' were better living their own essence.”
“The Epidemic”
Dino Buzzati, Trans. by Judith Landry
“The whole great office had been organized for the war, and functioned at a slacker pace nowadays; but the staff of the department was still complete. The men who worked there were the best in the country at the particular work concerned. They were known jokingly within the Ministry as the 'twenty-four geniuses.' ”
“As an illustration of what I was up against at Napa State Hospital, what they used to call an asylum for the criminally insane, my fellow inmate Arn Boothby, an angry three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who regularly “cheeked” his meds, tried to kill another inmate one day in the client convenience store by grabbing his throat and throwing him through a glass display case.”
“Captain Renzi”
Alessandro Spina, Trans. by André Naffis-Sahely
“Captain Renzi's gaze was lifeless: instead of establishing a dialogue with his interlocutor, he'd been tasked to ensure it wouldn't happen. Even his way of talking put people off: he meticulously avoided any kind of intimacy, which made any dialogue with him as abstract as a carpet's geometric patterns.”
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