When I saw her first, she looked just like a statue, holding a spade above the dark soil of her daughter’s garden. Seeing her made me feel an intense awareness of what I knew a little bit, and what I didn’t know at all. The body given to me was this one, not that. Later I would seek her out, then she would tell me a few of the stories hidden in her mute figure.
New short fiction from Jessica Sequeira.
I did not know that Ingrid av Enga was my grandmother until many years after she had died and my work led me to her basement archives. The house stood empty in a row of identical bungalows erected sometime in the boom years following the war. Evidently it was the kind one could purchase from a Sears catalog, one that had arrived in pieces on the back of a truck.
A short story from Eric Blix.
Did the insomniacs teach you nothing? you’ve never even come across one? by shaking them you were unable, in spite of all your efforts, to extract them from that sleep beyond all measure that steals over them when their insomnia ebbs away at last? were you surprised by the comas into which insomniacs fall in order to escape their insomnias? If so, then go and see the calligraphers: they alone will be able to tell you about the city; their brushes underscore its features and they walk repetitively up and down the same streets in order to complete their writing exercises, or simply to get from one place to the next as rapidly as possible — that is what a few good souls told me, people of sound counsel, wrong one out of two times.
Excerpt from Geometries in the Dust by Pierre Senges.
“I must formulate completely the work I’m going to undertake. I must search for the law to which all things submit.” Beginning at the beginning. Ah! The first word.
An extract from Palenque Hotel, a new novel by Louis Armand.
Paul arrives in Patras and lights a cigarette. It is four pm and hot. Sweltering in fact. It has been all summer and even though it is now September the heat shows no sign of letting up. From the coach across southern Greece, Paul had seen trees blackened by forest fires and white walls stained with smoke. He crossed rivers that had become beige dried-up banks and he watched a dog limp across a road to beg an old man for water. Everywhere you look there are signs of the damage being done to the land by the heat, but here in Patras no-one seems to care.
An extract from Thomas Chadwick‘s Above the Fat — this month’s Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month.
Supposedly, to be a voyeur is to be a pervert, but he was not that: it was not genitals or infidelities that excited him—primarily, it should be said, because of course they did, too—it was the chance to see someone as they are, that was all.
An extract from Hugh Fulham-McQuillan‘s forthcoming story collection, Notes on Jackson and His Dead.
From where did this belief, this faith in me, stem? This is what I think secretly infuriated Claire, though she herself believed just the same as they did about me. Perhaps it came down to the sheer confidence of my line, which was irrefutable; or the speed with which I’d absorbed my lessons in methods and materials, in draftsmanship especially, and later in painting. Actually, these kinds of measures were useless in gauging an artist’s deeper gifts, but then, these were academic artists surrounding me. What could you expect of them?
The conclusion of chapter one from Mark de Silva‘s new novel, The Logos.
I have always thought of her face as a mistake. Always—even before I could see the world wouldn’t turn out as we’d hoped. Where was it, though? The flaw. I suppose you could just have well have asked, which of her faces did I mean?
The start of chapter one from Mark de Silva‘s new novel, The Logos.
Many years have gone by and this morning I have a sudden desire: I would like my father’s ashes. After the cremation, they sent me a small object that had resisted the fire. A nail. They returned it intact. I wondered then if they had really left it in his suit pocket. It must burn with Johannes, I had told the staff of the crematorium. They were not to take it out of his pocket. In his hands it would have been too visible. Today I would like his ashes. It will probably be an urn like any other. The name engraved on a plate. A bit like a soldier’s dog tags. Why was it then that it had not occurred to me to ask for the ashes?
An extract from Fleur Jaeggy‘s Proleterka, translated by Alastair McEwen.
Here’s how come the title. O, it was so beautiful. The room was. I stood and swooned—and said what you just read. I swear it to you, that I stood in the doorway and said, “O, the beauty of the room.” Well, sure, I see it, don’t think I don’t see it—my saying I said O when, who knows, might it have been oh I said?
New fiction by Gordon Lish.
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