Exclusive Excerpt: The Distance by Ivan Vladislavić
Branko A single year brings two big changes: I become a man and my brother becomes an American. My new status is announced by Mrs Mitchell from over the road when she hears that my voice is breaking.
Fiction
Exclusive Extract: Between Beirut and the Moon by Naji Bakhti
That night I snuck out of the house and walked for half an hour to Ramlet AlBayda. It was the only public sandy shore left in Beirut, courtesy of the warlords who ran the country after the end of the civil war.
Fiction
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don’t ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that’s all you need to know.
Fiction
Less Than Perfect by Prateek Nigam
Anasuya lies between the crumpled bedding. Even the slightest touch of the chenille blanket irks her. The cooler spews warm air into the bedroom of their top floor apartment in Bangalore. The walls seem to glow with heat like a tandoor. She kicks the blanket into a ball, pushing it into a corner.
Fiction
Quite A Catch by Matsuda Aoko
Hina-chan has such beautiful skin, I think as I wash her. Using a linen washcloth I’ve specially ordered to avoid irritating her delicate skin cells, I start from her toes, working slowly up the length of her body stretched out supine in the water.
Fiction
How to Marry an African President by Erica Sugo Anyadike
When you are interviewed for BBC documentaries in your palace, they will want to know how you met. Cast your eyes downward and tell them how you were a shy and hardworking secretary in the State House typing pool. Omit to mention that you were married. Lie that you were divorced and not looking.
Fiction
Gathering by Susan Hunter Downer
I woke up at 4:12am on 27 December and it was gone. It stayed for Christmas and Boxing Day and then just disappeared. It’s not that I don’t know where to find my table, it’s that I don’t know how to find it, and I’ve got to find it because … I can’t quite touch the future without it.
Fiction
Writing Britain Now: Isabel Waidner
Isabel Waidner is a writer and critical theorist. Their novel We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff (2019) was shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and is currently shortlisted for this year's Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Fiction
Hard Borders by James Young
James Young is a Northern Irish writer, translator and journalist. His short fiction has appeared in a number of literary journals, and as a journalist he has written for several leading newspapers and websites.
Fiction
Third Person Female by Alicia Mietus
The fraught intricacies of a mother-daughter relationship form the core of 'Third Person Female', woven from the fabric of day-to-day life, shared cooking, childhood memories—and the differences of age and culture that flare up in the face of a new and unexpected relationship.
Fiction
She is Our Stupid by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi landed on the literary landscape with her ‘great Ugandan novel’, Kintu, which won the Kwani?
Fiction
Dead Tongues by Peter J Coles
Image credit: Douglas Perkins … The ramen reminded Tabeko of the cove in which she grew up. She held the sides of the earthenware bowl and imagined they were the sheer mountains that encircled the bay her family home overlooked, a thousand kilometres away from her apartment in Tokyo.
Fiction
Last Evening’s Call with Mother by Melusi Nkomo
Shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 … I’m having a drink on my balcony. The lights from Zürich and surrounding villages coruscate a prism of dreamy colors on the lake. The air is still and there’s no wind.
Fiction
The Window by Nicki Frith
Image via State Library of Queensland … 'The Window' was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 'Fiction' category. The morning after election night, she was Big News. The Metro had selected a small photo of her, taken from her Facebook page, smiling with her best smile.
Fiction
Plunder by Deirdre Shanahan
Image by Khanya, The Designer … Winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2018 Fiction Category … It’s warm in the shop, the window so wide the whole of the street is beside me. But it could be warmer.
Fiction
Bobby by Sarah Frances Armstrong
Lydia’s new therapist is all corduroy trousers and flat-heeled sandals. Hair pulled back in a ponytail as if it has been slicked with starch. Brown-rimmed glasses that melt into her face. Mousey, as if she doesn’t want to be a distraction to the Healing Process.
Fiction
The Wait by Pauline Walker
From the harbour she looked like a tiny black beetle scurrying up the hill towards the oblivion of the horizon. The sinews in her thighs burned and her fingers were numb from the bags she carried filled with potatoes, yams, breadfruits and acres of cotton muslin.
Fiction
Seven Hells by Zaid Hassan
‘I need to speak with you, meet me at Al Nuaimi Café in 15 minutes’. Helin wiped the sweat from her forehead using the knuckles of her left hand and checked the time on the phone she held in the other.
Fiction
Sixteen, Seventeen by Max Dunbar
Parallel to the Learning Centre there was a playing field, lined and oblong and chopped and trimmed with regularity, bordered with hedges and visible through the classroom windows: apart from a patch at the far corner that had a cluster of cottonwood trees.
Fiction
On Day 21 by Ruby Cowling
Nineteen days of rain – unprecedented, they said – and I could hardly tell it was morning. E, my youngest, was screaming and had me up for four hours the previous night, so I switched her off, laid her on the bed and gently closed the door. The silence a soft blanket around me.
Fiction
The Heavens Also Weep by Sarah Udoh-Grossfurthner
The Heavens Also Weep … I call it the day the heavens wept. I’d arrived home unexpectedly and there was my father battering my mother on the kitchen floor. Beyond a sensation of heaviness in the pit of my stomach, three things will ever remain clear about that afternoon.
Fiction
A Zulu Warrior King Checks His Email by Glen Retief
Sunday afternoon sweltered hot and rainless. On the cul-de-sac next to the alligator canal, the humidity shimmered off the black tarmac, giving the neatly-trimmed hedges, palms, and ficus trees a fluid, iridescent sheen. In his computer room in the white three-bedroomed ranch house…
Fiction
SmartDog by Maria Hummer
‘I bought you something,’ Duncan said, ‘but you can’t love it.’ … ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘That’s the rule,’ he said, and he lifted a blanket off his surprise for me, a little mechanical dog. Its tail and ears were furry but the legs were metallic and its torso was smooth white plastic.
Fiction
I Am a Forest, and a Night of Dark Trees by Jarred McGinnis
Fritz told me once, ‘ Be the sea so that you may receive their polluted streams but not become impure.’ … At Elysians, a secure psychiatric unit for adolescents, our days began by lining up for a tiny paper cup.
Fiction