Learning What Love Means
Mathieu Lindon (trans. by Bruce Benderson)
“Do you feel something?” says Gérard.
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 95)
Excerpts
“Elmore Leonard”
Ben Loory
“Elmore Leonard was a famous writer, but this isn’t a story about him. This is a story about my friend Elmore Leonard, who wasn’t a famous writer at all. Oh, he was a writer, my friend Elmore Leonard; he just wasn’t a famous one.”
Swallowing Mercury
Wioletta Greg (Trans. Eliza Marciniak)
“That spring, my father got hold of an excavator and widened the pond behind our house.”
The Designee
T.C. Boyle
“What he couldn’t have imagined, even in his bleakest assessments of the future, was the boredom.”
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
“Sometimes I think I understand everything else more than I’ll ever understand Leonie.”
Worlds from the Word’s End
Joanna Walsh
“It’s the old story: It’s not you, it’s me. Or, rather, it’s the place we’re at.”
Dinner at the Center of the Earth
Nathan Englander
“It’s never about you. Neither attack, nor counterattack. Not the three boys kidnapped, surely dead, or the child murdered in the forest, burned alive.”
Black Jesus
Venita Blackburn
“After school I arrived at home, took off my shoes at the door, kissed the 8x10 photo of black Jesus in the hall, ate Froot Loops over the sink so Nana wouldn’t scream if I spilled milk on the carpet, and then watched tv.”
To Die in Spring
Ralf Rothmann (Trans. Shaun Whiteside)
“Silence, deep concealment, particularly about the dead, is ultimately a vacuum that fills with truth.”
“The Reunion”
Silvia Kwon
“Chien woke in the dark, before sunrise, just as the rooster began to crow.”
The Strange Bird
Jeff VanderMeer
“The Strange Bird’s first thought was of a sky over an ocean she had never seen, in a place far from the fire-washed laboratory from which she emerged, cage smashed open but her wings, miraculous, unbroken.”
The Talented Ribkins
Ladee Hubbard
“He only came back because Melvin said he would kill him if he didn’t pay off his debt by the end of the week.”
Grace
Paul Lynch
“This flood October. And in the early light her mother goes for her, rips her from sleep, takes her from a dream of the world."
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Cherise Wolas
“Joan Ashby was frank with Martin Manning right from the start: “There are two things you should know about me.”
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