The Bone People

Keri Hulme

He walks down the street.

The Pursuit of Love

Nancy Mitford

There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh.

The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles

He awoke, opened his eyes.Si svegliò, aprì gli occhi. La stanza gli diceva poco o niente, profondamente immerso com'era nel non-essere da cui era appena affiorato. Se l'energia di accertare la propria collocazione nel tempo e nello spazio gli mancava, gliene mancava anche il desiderio. Sapeva soltanto di esistere, d'avere attraversato vaste regioni per ritornare dal nulla; c'era, al centro della sua coscienza, la certezza di una tristezza infinita e al tempo stesso rassicurante, perché era la sola ad essergli familiare.

The Warden

Anthony Trollope

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of ---; let us call it Barchester.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils

Selma Lagerlöf

The Wapshot Chronicle

John Cheever

St. Botolphs was an old place, an old river town.

Life

Georges Perec

<i> Preamble</i> To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance.... PART ONE, CHAPTER ONE Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regualrly and distantly resounds.

The Soft Machine

William S. Burroughs

I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not bad fifteen cents on average night boosting the afternoons and short timing the dawn we made out from the land of the free but I was running out of veins . . .

The Leopard

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

'<i>Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.</i>'

The Joke

Milan Kundera

So here I was, home again after all those years. Standing in the main square (which I had crossed countless times as a child, as a boy, as a young man), I felt no emotion whatsoever; all I could think was that the flat space, with the spire of the town hall (like a soldier in an ancient helmet) rising above the rooftops, looked like a huge parade ground and that the military past of the Moravian town, once a bastion against Magyar and Turk invaders, had engraved an irrevocable ugliness on its face.