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  • Word War

    Adania Shibli

    A story about destruction: « In a matter of minutes, the target is neutralised, the word is erased. »

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  • Am Boden

    Marc Lunghuss

    A story about eternity. « A fully glued-on carpet is an uncompromising rejection of the future, a denial of death. »

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  • Animal game

    Agnes Lidbeck

    A story about family. « ‘A woman of few words,’ he smiled. ‘How refreshing.’ »

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  • « The hope of future Pan-African socialism »

    Jackie Thomae

    A group of « skinny Black lads » enroll at Leipzig’s Karl Marx University in East Germany. An excerpt from Jackie Thomae’s novel Brothers.

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  • Hitchhiker

    Defne Suman

    A story about danger. « She wondered when he was going to ask her where she was going. »

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  • The original Dybbuk

    Menachem Kaiser

    A story about afterlife. « A saint! What do you mean he’s a saint! the scholar says. He’s a librarian! Are librarians saints? »

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  • Trouble at work and home while my son is abroad

    Francesco Pacifico

    A story about living. « I have a family and I have a job and I have a teaching gig, and these things have me. »

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  • Streuselkuchen

    Marc Lunghuss

    A story about coolness. « The phone rings. It is Jim Jarmusch, and he asks if I want to come over to his place. »

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  • Perhentian Sunrise

    Preeta Samarasan

    A story about romance. « The eve of a suitor’s arrival, bigger than Christmas or birthday, I tell you. »

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  • WHOOOO

    Sergei Lebedev

    A story about a lonely railway guard on a desolate steppe. « In the cursed August of 1991 the radio informed Kasatonov that there was a state of emergency in the capital. Then it fell silent, as if the receiver had broken. »

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  • A Silence Shared

    Lalla Romano

    « If a story just like that one — dying babies, divine retribution — had come back to me from childhood memories, it would have seemed fantastical, unreal. »

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  • The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden

    Margaret Drabble

    A story about quarks and antiquarks, beauty quarks and strangelets, gluons, muons, prions, hadrons and charms.

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  • An Unlucky Man

    Megan McDowell

    « He rolled down the window, went back to honking the horn, and started waving my underpants out the window. »

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  • A Madman’s Tale

    Enric Valor

    « I guess it all began, » he said, « because of that weak-headedness my father sometimes had. It just rubbed me the wrong way. »

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  • Metaphrasis

    Menachem Kaiser

    A short story about fiction, from the author of Plunder.

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  • A rather disproportionate intervention

    Ijoma Mangold

    An excerpt from Ijoma Mangold’s memoir, Das Deutsche Krokodil (The German Crocodile), available in English translation from the DAS Editions imprint of Digitalback Books

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  • By misadventure

    David Mitchell

    A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. « Possibly a dare, or a rite of passage, hung in the air. Remember their age: most late teenagers are immortal. »

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  • Stupid illnesses called « childhood »

    Marina Jarre

    An excerpt from I padri lontani / Distant Fathers (1987), the rediscovered memoir of Marina Jarre, available in English translation from New Vessel Press.

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  • The final frontier

    Ali Smith

    New short fiction from the author of Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. A story about what’s ours and what’s not ours.

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