Fiction Archives

This Garment Called Life

By Hélène Bessette, from Lili Is Crying, which will be published next month by New Directions. Translated from the French by Kate Briggs. It’s like this, says Lili. I left…

Talking Horse

by Ali Smith,

From Gliff, which will be published this month by Pantheon. How do you say hello to a horse? I said. I’ll show you, my sister said. We were standing in…

Doppelgänger

by Gil Cuadros,

From My Body Is Paper, which will be published this month by City Lights. In 1996, Cuadros died of AIDS complications at the age of thirty-four. I had been breathing…

Jim and Eilis

by Colm Tóibín,

From Long Island, which was published last month by Scribner. When Martin entered, the bar was empty. Jim served him a bottle of Guinness, then went into the stockroom at…

Everything Extremely Alive

by Nicolette Polek,

From Bitter Water Opera, which will be published this month by Graywolf Press. I walked down a thin path, spotting in the distance a tall stone wall, as instructed. My…

Fortune’s Prime

by Aryn Kyle,

Years later, my grandmother would still tell people that I learned to swim in a movie star’s pool, though she always said this with the same slanted tone and pinched…

The Egg

by Sanaë Lemoine,

Leggete Tolkien, Stolti!

by Hari Kunzru,

If you had asked ten-year-old me about my favorite author, I would have replied unhesitatingly that it was J.R.R. Tolkien. The experience of reading The Lord of the Rings had been…

Our Pierre

by Cormac James,

From Trondheim, which was published last month by Bellevue Literary Press. On the day their son was going to die, Lil had given herself the task of carrying forty-plus sacks…

Love Hurts

by Édouard Louis,

From a fictional dialogue with his father in his novel Change, which will be published this month by Harvill Secker. Translated from the French by John Lambert. Before meeting Elena…

The Licentiate’s Children

by Juan Gabriel Vásquez,Translated by Phil Klay,

From a speech published in the book El arte de la distorsión. Vásquez is the author, most recently, of the story collection Songs for the Flames. Translated from the Spanish.…

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