Red Clocks
Leni Zumas
“When the polar explorer turned six, she was shown the best way to hold a knife and how to make a slice across the lamb’s throat—just one, they don’t feel it, do it hard, watch your brother.”
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 97)
Excerpts
Rachel Gardner
Katherine Karlin
“I became Rachel Gardner when I was 20, in 1968, a year from which no event sticks with me as much as the discovery that I was one-half goy.”
The Winter Station
Jody Shields
“When Andreev said two bodies had been discovered outside the Kharbin train station, the Baron had an image of the dead men sprawled against snow, frozen in positions their bodies couldn’t hold in life.”
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi, Trans. by Jonathan Wright
“Hasib Mohamed Jaafar was 21 years old, dark, slim, and married to Dua Jabbar.”
The Juniper Tree
Barbara Comyns
“When I was a child, just before my father left us, he gave me a large doll. She had rather an ugly face and stiff hair you couldn’t brush, but I loved her.”
Temple of the Scapegoat
Alexander Kluge, Trans. by Isabel Cole, Donna Stonecipher, and Martin Chalmers
“In her second semester at an art academy in southern Germany, the daughter of a brewery owner (with properties in Bavaria, but also in the Czech Republic) met and fell in love with a Japanese man. ”
The Cat
Janice Obuchowski
“For almost two years, I’ve lived at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed, in a tiny neighborhood in the woodsy outskirts of a New England college town.”
Little Reunions
Eileen Chang, Trans. by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz
“Just when she thought her torment was over, he reappeared.”
The Last Days of Oscar Wilde
John Vanderslice
“He stared hard at Frank Harris, harder than he ever had, because this fact Harris needed to understand, even if it had to be driven in with hammer and nail.”
Heartland
Ana Simo
“Killing a pig is easy. Pigs are like fat babies. Hot-blooded, squirmy, squealing, sly, and utterly useless unless you like their meat.”
Theory of Shadows
Paolo Maurensig, Trans. by Anne Milano Appel
“Once again I wake up in the dead of night, smothered by the late August heat, and, finding myself lying in a bed at this modest hotel in Estoril, I am overcome by anxiety.”
The Afterlives
Thomas Pierce
“I’d never actually eaten at Su Casa Siempre, but I’d passed by it a hundred times and more.”
The Job of the Wasp
Colin Winnette
“Upon my arrival at the facility, I was asked what I hoped to get out of my time there and how I planned to make myself useful.”
The Transition
Luke Kennard
"Janna and Stu's house was the second in a row of four Georgian terraces, elegant sandstone buildings with high ceilings and multi-pane windows."
The Immortalists
Chloe Benjamin
"Varya is thirteen. New to her are three more inches of height and the dark patch of fur between her legs."
Woman at 1,000 Degrees
Hallgrímur Helgason, trans. by Brian FitzGibbon
“I live here alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade.”
The Woman in the Window
A. J. Finn
“My French leçon today, and Les Diaboliques tonight. A rat-bastard husband, his “little ruin” of a wife, a mistress, a murder, a vanished corpse.”
The Restless
Gerty Dambury (trans. Judith G. Miller)
“Let me tell you how the first suit the child’s father ever made got him involved with the communists, even if he didn’t plan it that way.”
The World Goes On
László Krasznahorkai (trans. by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, & John Batki)
“How lovely it would be, a world that we could end by organizing a series of lectures—anywhere in this departing world—and give it the general subtitle, “Lecture Series on Area Theory,” where one after another, as in a circus arena, lecturers from all parts of the world would talk about “area theory””
The Mannequin Makers
Craig Cliff
“My name is Gabriel Doig. I was born into a family of ships’ carvers on the banks of the River Clyde in Scotland. ”
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