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A Battle
Patrick Süskind
‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’
Menudo
Raymond Carver
‘Vicky says I’m crazy. She said worse things too last night. But who could blame her?’
The Development Game
Leonard Frank
‘We are six on the mission to the North-west Frontier: an old Japanese, a Korean, an American, a Bangladeshi, a Dutch girl, me. ... We've got four weeks to come up with a project for, say, thirty million dollars.’
Empire
Richard Ford
‘Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around.’
Fast Lanes
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’
Fishing with Wussy
Richard Russo
‘Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of ‘my heavenly father’, whose existence was a matter of record, but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore irrelevant.’
Memphis
Ellen Gilchrist
‘He drove off in her car. He was wearing a white visor, a white shirt with long sleeves. I don't believe the world I lived to see.’
The Contas Girl
Robert Olmstead
‘He always felt foolish after he finished making love to the Contas girl. He felt a little piece had been given up of its own will.’
Escapes
Joy Williams
‘We went directly out of the theatre and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher's arm.’
Fiction by Joy Williams.
Knives
Louise Erdrich
‘It is time, now, for Karl to break down with his confession that I am a slow-burning fuse in his loins. A hair trigger. I am a name he cannot silence. A dream that never burst.’
Fiction by Louise Erdrich.
