Five coming-of-age stories

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Over the Fourth of July holiday in 1985, when I was seventeen years old, the film producer Morris Walls took me to Hammer Island. This is an island shaped like…

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On the morning of his visit to the Forbidden City, the last day of his China trip, James woke exhausted, as he had almost every day he had been there.…

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By Rachel Kushner, from The Strange Case of Rachel K, out in February 2015 from New Directions. Kushner is the author of the novels Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers.

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“The thing you have to understand is that I really don’t understand people.” Gil sat on a squashy old sofa, legs akimbo, forearms on thighs. He was wearing a dark-green…

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By David Albahari, from Learning Cyrillic, a collection of short stories forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in December. Albahari is a Serbian novelist whose books include Words Are Something Else,…

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The lake is still and the stars are mammoth. She glides beneath the surface, a dark form he can follow but cannot see until she passes through starlight, this long-limbed…

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The ladies gathered for one of their potlucks. They brought beautiful dishes. Red cabbage marinated in vinegars and slow-cooked with nutmeg and caraway seed. Salade niçoise with basil and thyme…

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By Ben Lerner, from 10:04, a novel published this month by Faber and Faber. Lerner is the author of a previous novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and three books of…

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