‘‘I was tired of being the other,’ you said during one of our Scrabble games. ‘You know, these days they even discriminate against bald, clean-shaven white men with weird- sounding names. Well, I am not exotic. I am exhausted.’’
New fiction by Viken Berberian.
‘It had been an early education, Nathu thought, in the fact that all history was historical fiction. A story had a longer life than a fact.’
An extract from Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal.
‘I wanted to learn something that would shock me, something that came from someplace very far outside of myself. I was tired of learning things I could have pulled out of my own mind very easily and passively.’
New fiction by Harriet Armstrong.
‘He said if he had done it, then that person would have almost certainly drowned, and he’d be a murderer.’
New fiction from Claire Carroll.
‘I noticed she had listed three options. To hurt her. To get her attention. To make a point. I remembered learning about the rule of three at school, and I realised that it was probably a universal thing – or maybe she only used three examples when she spoke English.’
New fiction by Kieran Wyatt.
‘When you are unhappy wherever you go, the common denominator is you, Teddy’s ex-girlfriend told him, with a cruelty so uncharacteristic as to be true.’
New fiction by Sheila Armstrong.
‘She was so very, very fortunate, yes, she was.’
New fiction by Jane Messer.
‘For several long minutes, nothing changed. We seemed to be opposite and equal forces.’
New fiction by Laura Shaine Cunningham.
‘I knew that the building had been turned into a block of luxury condos and bore no internal resemblance to the halls my favourite writers would have walked; and I knew it hardly mattered either way, that I could have curled up in Sylvia Plath’s unwashed sheets and it wouldn’t make me a better writer.’
New fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
‘I have been searching for the word to describe the feeling of wanting big things, a hunger that grows and surpasses what I have inherited.’
New fiction by Jimin Kang.
‘Then I told him he looked like a lop-sided Trent Reznor and didn’t he want to kiss me? This is a kind of flirting. This has never not worked.’
Fiction by Sarah Fletcher.
‘She was going to have a large life, an important life. She could feel it.’
Fiction by Hadley Franklin, winner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2023.
‘“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” said my mother. “Did you know the Jesuits say ‘Give me a child before the age of seven and he’ll be mine forever?’” “Who are the Jesuits?” “Priests.” “Oh.” She tousled my hair. “Thank god you’ve met none.”’
New fiction by Jago Rackham.
‘I mean something closer to: am I a good person? Am I sincere and devout to those things in my life that I ought to be?’
New fiction by Benjamin George Coles.
‘The few days turned to weeks and years and it was a decade before we spoke about the future, a conversation focused on the past.’
New fiction by Gary Finnegan.
‘And then, finally, what really puzzled him: what, I mean, what were women? What was it about them, as a group, that had always made him a little wary? They suddenly seemed too wearying an abstraction, like the geometry of curved space.’
New fiction by Madeleine Stein.
‘You grow up in poverty. You are told you are lucky, and that luck is why you are the only child in the family who gets an education. You have a natural sense for numbers, and feel that luck is a question of numbers. It is a question of the number of years separating you and your siblings from the source of luck.’
New fiction by Lilia Salammbô Fetini.
‘I’d heard about the surgery even before Cathy reminded me of it. They’d discussed it on the radio one morning, and I’d half listened as I was making coffee, but it seemed experimental – outlandish, even – and I assumed the idea would flicker, smoke, and then go out, like the time they talked about finding volunteers to go to space forever.’
New fiction by Sarah Turner.
