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At The Kitchen Table

Peter Orner

‘Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s almost joy in it. Why not scream it? Glory.’

Preserves for Life

Olga Tokarczuk

‘He came upon one under the kitchen sink labelled ‘Shoestrings in vinegar, 2004’, and that should have alarmed him.’

Brass

Joy Williams

‘You’re the low-hanging fruit.’

The Starveling

Don DeLillo

‘All human existence is a trick of light.’

She Murdered Mortal He

Sarah Hall

‘Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed.’

The Colonel’s Son

Roberto Bolaño

‘Then Julie extracts her victim’s heart and eats it.’

The Dune

Stephen King

‘Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power.’

Diem Perdidi

Julie Otsuka

‘When you ask her your name, she does not remember what it is.’

A Lovely and Terrible Thing

Chris Womersley

‘For a moment I could not speak. I looked off into the bleak distance, then at this man, and there was something about the sad shake of his head and the way his hair flapped about on his scalp that filled me with unreasonable warmth.’

Vampire

Robert Coover

‘His wife comes in, baring, with a wink, her incisors, and offers him a Bloody Mary.’

Out of the Tombs

Madison Smartt Bell

‘He had always been curious as to what lay behind the gate: a metal portcullis, of an almost medieval aspect, opposite the corner of Columbus Park.’

Auto-Suggestion

Toby Litt

‘I began to think, for no particular reason, about what the exact series of events would be were I to die at that moment – before, even, my coffee went cold.’

Banyan

Robert Olen Butler

‘I wake and it’s dark and a woman is beside me, naked and small, and she is waking too and the room is still heavy with the incense she burned for her dead.’