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Extracts

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The Body

Long ago, when I was a junior high school student in America, I remember being taught by a biology teacher that all the chemicals that make up a human body could be bought in a hardware store for $5 or something like that.

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Dear Girls

Dear Girls, You are prohibited from reading this book until you are twenty-one years old.

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The Cockroach

That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.

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Maybe the Horse Will Talk

‘I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.’

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19th Christmas

It was four nights before Christmas Eve, and the city of San Francisco had decked the halls, houses, and grand public edifices in a sparkling, merry Christmas display.

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The Shape of Night

Even now I still dream about Brodie’s Watch, and the nightmare is always the same.

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Agent Running in the Field

Our meeting was not contrived. Not by me, not by Ed, not by any of the hidden hands supposedly pulling at his strings.

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Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister

The best-known modern Chinese ‘fairy tale’ is the story of three sisters from Shanghai, born in the last years of the nineteenth century.

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Blue Moon

The city looked small on a map of America. It was just a tiny polite dot, near a red threadlike road that ran across an otherwise empty half inch of paper.

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North Korea Journal

For much of the year I had been awaiting the go-ahead on what was potentially one of the most demanding, exhausting, but exhilarating acting roles I’d ever been offered.

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Grand Union

‘I would like to be on good terms with all animals,’ remarked the woman, to her daughter.

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Letters from an Astrophysicist

Now that people communicate with one another primarily by social media, letter-writing has become a lost art.

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Christmas Shopaholic

OK. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. I’ve got 5 minutes 52 seconds before my basket expires.

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The Water Dancer

And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life

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Everything is Figureoutable

My mother has the tenacity of a bulldog, looks like June Cleaver, and curses like a truck driver.

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The Testaments

Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. Already I am petrified.

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Khaki Town

There was a tap at the north-east door. Seated behind his desk by the windows, he looked up expectantly, knowing who would be announced.

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Buckley's Chance

Tracing the footsteps of William Buckley is not easy and not just because his strides were so long.

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We are the Weather

The oldest suicide note was written in ancient Egypt about four thousand years ago.

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On Fire

Young people around the world are cracking open the heart of the climate crisis, speaking of a deep longing for a future they thought they had but that is disappearing with each day that adults fail to act on the reality that we are in an emergency.

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Killer Instinct

Professor Jahan Darvish nudged his thick black glasses along the bridge of his nose and stared into the minibar fridge of his swanky Manhattan hotel suite while doing his best to ignore the outrageous price list posted off to the side.

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Quichotte

There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a travelling man of Indian origin, advancing years and retreating mental powers

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The Titanic Secret

The sky over Manhattan was the color of old pewter.

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Where the Light Enters

Later, when people asked about her travels, Sophie would put it simply: the trip to Europe as a bride was hazy in her memory, but she would never forget the voyage home as a widow.

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