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Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis

We walked along a stretch of empty road towards the lights we’d seen from the highway and came to a strip of small tired storefronts and a donut shop. Her eyes lit up. Frosting in the morning made her happy all day.

My Education by Susan Choi

Once, when still heavy and tethered; and intimate and yet hard, like some tool of a doctor’s, against which, with a sense of transgression, we could squash a hot cheek; when transmitting the sound of the other with that erstwhile fidelity that allowed us to feel they were with us in bed; the telephone, that old bludgeon-shape thing with the corkscrew-curl cord, was intensely romantic.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be so much worse.”

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

Origami Club was held in Clayton’s apartment, and the first unusual thing was that Clayton’s apartment was on a street Graham had never heard of and he thought he knew every street in Manhattan. Walter Street? Where the hell was that? On the Lower East Side, as it turned out. And although the building looked like all the other low red-brick buildings around it, it had a bright green door, which made Graham think of enchanted forests. There was no doorman and the hallway had black-and-white hexagonal tile and smelled deeply of cabbage and rent control.

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

Binkie—what are you up to? She’s diaphanous, but in a flinty way, like a seashell. Metallic layers. She’s the sound of a martini pitcher stirred with a sterling spoon. The spell of Après le Ondée and thin cigarettes. She was handed more personality than other mortals, and chemically fertilized in a glasshouse—now her bionic strength allows her to teleport platters of watercress sandwiches from the kitchen to the library, where she’s beating her best friend at backgammon. Her own dogs fear her. Her staff never needs disciplining because they live in terror—her authority hums on a supersonic level to all the creatures in the land.

* * *

Blackberry like the eye of a fly. Cut the liver out of the clock, wrap in wax paper and write a number in grease pencil. Do what they say and survive. Cut flowers for the table. Tell no one what day it is. Sleepwalk instead of dream. Run don’t walk. Go to town on Thursday—buy gingham and salt. Forget the dead. Keep singing if you forget the words. Love the ferns.

Pillow by Andrew Battershill

Pillow left the body in the living room and went to the kitchen. He used a heavy rotary phone on the wall to call Don Costes, who showed up in what seemed like two minutes but could have been any amount of time. Pillow felt like he’d just taken a long drink of alone water.

Alone water is similar to lemon water, but with a sharp, clawing bleakness squeezed into the water instead of half a lemon.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast as you can. Don’t stop. Don’t try to talk. Nothing good can come of it.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

The kid come forit then in to the lite from the vennylater and looking strait at me. Only not realy looking he dint have no eyes to look with he dint have no parper face. It were like it ben shapit qwick and rough out of clay. No eyes nor no hoals for eyes there wernt nothing where the eyes shudve been. . . .

He said, “You dont have to make no Bad Luck go a way syn I aint no Bad Luck Im whats lef after the Bad Luck ben. Im pas the tern and on the way to Good Luck.”

No Bones by Anna Burns

On the other hand, I knew she wasn’t goin’ to eat because she never did. She just turned up to look at the food and there she was now, looking at it, as if, if she’d let it, it could fill her up just by its very appearance. As far as I could remember, her system seemed to be something like: seven days off, followed by seven days off, followed by seven days off, followed by a plate of rhubarb.

* * *

Now it was time. She put on her backpack. The children hurried over, sobbing, to say goodbye.

“We hate you, we hate you, we hope you die. We hope you fall in the water. We hope you bump your head off the boat. We hope sharks come up and eat you. We hope the waves are high. We hope thunder and lightning runs through your body. We hope you drown when you’re very nearly saved. We hope—”

Amelia got out and closed the door. She exhaled deeply. Leaning against the funeral bow, she then breathed in slowly, just as deep, again. She felt dizzy with the way feelings went. How did anybody ever survive feelings? Did anybody ever survive them? No wonder, she thought, so many didn’t bother having them to try.

The Translation of Dr. Apelles by David Treuer

Now, if Zola, or anyone else, but if Zola at the restaurant had asked what was it like when you were growing up? what was the reservation like? could he say that the days, the short days of winter and the long days of summer, when the sun stayed so long that just when the afternoon began it felt like a whole new day had been added on to the one you had just enjoyed and the night would never come, and that in those hours life was very full, and there was so much to do you never wondered who you were and what the answer might mean, and that the people of your childhood, your parents who, neither one no matter what, ever said or did a cruel thing, and your uncle often got very drunk but was always kind, and Adolphe who lived behind the village had such a funny way of swinging his arms when he walked and he walked with a limp because he had dropped a crate of ammunition on his foot during the First World War but played the fiddle at all the jigs, or the girl who owned a pack of dogs and could climb trees like no one else ever could and who climbed those trees and kept those dogs and sicced them every so often on her own father when he met her in the woods when she was alone because he wanted things she did not want to give, or the land itself; the ever-stretching swamps into which it felt that no one had ever gone before you and the pinestands, those that were left, anonymous and communal, and the hardwoods so full of secrets but so quiet and good to hunt in if there was snow. He could not.

The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony

But the threat of the Pechenegs was not to be taken lightly. They painted other people’s blood on their faces; they used the dry skulls of their victims for drinking cups; they sharpened both sides of wooden spears and thrust a human head onto one end and plunged the other end into the earth; they kicked bunny rabbits in the face. (Not in the side—in the face!)

Not Me by Michael Lavigne

. . . his books on the Zohar, his seven-volume set of the Talmud which had stretched across an entire shelf, his miniature reproduction of the Chagall Windows which had stood on a little stand next to the telephone, and, most hated of all, the music box in the shape of the Ten Commandments that played Hatikvah, the Jewish National Anthem.

Purity by Jonathan Franzen

“Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?”

“I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.”

* * *

It was the same sense I’d had when he looked at Anabel’s picture: he was happy to admire what I had as long as what he had was even better. This might not have boded well for a future friendship of equals, but there at the beginning, in the very warm car, it was consonant with my experience of crushes—the feeling of inferiority, the hope of being found worthy nonetheless.

* * *

Before he’d quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, but the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

Cocooned in a leather armchair Jonathan understands for the first time the English word cosy, the need their climate instills in them to pad their blue-veined bodies with layers of horsehair and mahogany, aspidistras and antimacassars, history, tradition, and share certificates. Being British, he decides, is primarily a matter of insulation.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru (favorite quote of 2016)

De Souza thinks that if Firoz is going to behave like this he will have to order a prairie oyster. That might help. Would it really be too much to ask? In reply Firoz launches a well-aimed highball glass. Brief curtain of Tom Collins.

The End by Salvatore Scibona

“Oh good, a game. My turn now,” she said. “The sun. A pumpkin. A twenty-dollar gold coin.”

“Things that are orange,” Ciccio said.

“You can do better than that, Costanza,” she said, slapping the back of her hand.

“Gather pennies and nickels,” Ciccio said. “Look up from a place of darkness to a tiny circle of light.”

She said, “Things that little underprivileged children do.”

“Wrong,” Ciccio said. “Cry for help. Play with the rope and the bucket.”

Rocco said, “Things to do in a well.”

* * *

Once inside, she kept her long johns on and wore a stocking hat in place of her hair. She couldn’t remember a chill that had lasted so long and defied so many means of throwing it off. She made herself wear a shawl—and she despised shawls. The urge to wear a shawl is the body’s advice that you had better get your paperwork in order and unhide the petty cash so your heirs won’t miss it.

Ill Will by Dan Chaon

Some people at the support group he’d been going to had helped him out, and now he had an efficiency on the northwest side of Chicago, and he had been saving his money to buy a cheap tablet and a Wi-Fi plan. At last, he could experience the shoddy magic of the twenty-first century. “This is amazing,” he said, and beamed out a blissful grin. “Like science fiction. Now all I have to do is get me a hover car and I’m really in the future.”

“Ha,” I said. I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn’t involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.

* * *

My apartment on Cicero is about two miles away, and I’m trying to walk down the street and talk to Wave on the cell phone at the same time. I’ve never tried this before and it’s an upsetting experience. . . . You think you’re staying alert but at the same time you’re conversing, you’re pulled by her voice into some hippie parlor in Oregon and also into your wayback machine of memories, and you stop in front of an auto body shop and think, Fuck, this is impossible. How do people walk and talk on these things at the same time? Read on them? Play games on them?

It’s because they are not walking, I realize. They are not in their actual bodies.

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