“Rather than fabulous and enviable, then, I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud.”
-Lisa Halliday
“The wind opened and closed Rawiya’s scarf like a lung.”
-Zeyn Joukhadar
“He was hiding something he exposed by his very attempt to conceal it, flanked by a dozen of their classmates who clung to his charisma like lint.”
-Susan Choi
“For days after getting a letter he was irascible and joyful, worked day and night, foamed out ideas like a fountain. Then slowly, with desperate spurts and struggles, he came back to earth, to dry ground, ran dry.”
-Ursula K. Le Guin
“Above us, maybe, is a full moon. It shimmers like an enormous backlit tooth, and we stop a moment to stare.”
-Jennifer duBois
“The city is an extension not strong enough for its own weight. The final crust on the edge of a peninsula, stuck out at the edge of the ocean like a dare–the kind that you know you won’t live through but that you go for anyway because you’re young and you don’t give a shit and there’s no backing down. But the city is old. It keeps daring itself not to bury its dead.”
-Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
“Wife three, it must be said, looked radiant, though it was a cold radiance like that of a blade. Treat me like an object of pity, her bearing announced, hint that I was somehow to blame, and I will cut you.”
-Sigrid Nunez
