by Sarah Hall
Lynn Coady is a Canadian novelist, journalist and TV writer. Her short story collection Hellgoing won the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize, for which her novel The Antagonist was also nominated in 2011. She has published six books of fiction and her work has appeared in the US, UK, Germany, Holland and France.
Ceridwen Dovey’s debut novel, Blood Kin, was published in fifteen countries and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Only the Animals, her first story collection, won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. She studied social anthropology at Harvard and New York University, and now lives with her husband and two sons in Sydney.
Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne but grew up on the West Australian coast. His novels, short stories and non-fiction, including The Drowner, Our Sunshine and The Shark Net, have been widely translated, won national and international prizes and been adapted for film, television, radio and the theatre.
Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963. He wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season, when he was seventeen. His other books include Small Circle of Beings, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, The Quarry, The Good Doctor, The Impostor and In a Strange Room. The Good Doctor was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Dublin/IMPAC Award, The Impostor was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His latest novel, Arctic Summer, was published in 2014. He lives in Cape Town.
Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and the University of Zimbabwe. Her debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Prize in 2009. Her debut novel, The Book of Memory, was published in 2015.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels – Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army, How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border – as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories. The first story in the collection, ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize she won in 2013 with ‘Mrs Fox’.
Peter Hobbs grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire and now lives in London. He is the award-winning author of two novels, The Short Day Dying and In the Orchard, the Swallows, as well as a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a writer-in-residence for the schools literacy charity, First Story.
Yiyun Li is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award. Her most recent novel, Kinder Than Solitude, was published to critical acclaim. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by the New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at the University of California, Davis.
Alexander MacLeod’s debut collection Light Lifting was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Light Lifting won an Atlantic Book Award and was named a ‘Book of the Year’ by the American Library Association, The Globe and Mail, and Amazon.ca. Alexander lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University.
Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times and McSweeney’s. He is the editor of New American Stories, and a professor at Columbia University in New York.
Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways to Begin, Even the Dogs and This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You. He is the winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was runner-up for the BBC National Short Story Award in both 2010 and 2011, with ‘If It Keeps on Raining’ and ‘Wires’ respectively. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits ‘The Letters Page’, a literary journal in letters.
Guadalupe Nettel’s acclaimed English-language debut, Natural Histories, was described by the New York Times as ‘five flawless stories’. Nettel has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Anna Seghers Prize, the Ribera del Duero Short Fiction Award and the Herralde Novel Prize. The Body Where I Was Born, her first novel to appear in English, was published in 2015. She lives and works in Mexico City.
Courttia Newland is the author of seven works of fiction including his debut, The Scholar. His latest novel, The Gospel According to Cane, was published in 2013 and has been optioned by Cowboy Films. He was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Frank O’Connor award, as well as numerous others. His short stories have appeared in many anthologies and broadcast on Radio 4. He is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing.
Taiye Selasi was born in London and raised in Boston. She holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford. ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’ (Granta, 2011), Selasi’s fiction debut, appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012. In 2013 Granta named her in its once-every-decade list of Best of Young British Novelists. Selasi’s debut novel Ghana Must Go (Penguin, 2013), a New York Times bestseller, was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. Her most recent novel is How to Be Both (Hamish Hamilton, 2014), and her most recent collection of stories is Public Library and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 2015).
Wells Tower is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, a book of short stories. He lives in North Carolina.
Alan Warner is the author of eight novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, The Deadman’s Pedal, which won the 2013 James Tait Black Prize, and Their Lips Talk of Mischief.
Claire Vaye Watkins was raised in the Mojave Desert, in California and Nevada. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris Review and the New York Times. Her short story collection, Battleborn, won five awards, including the Dylan Thomas Award. Gold Fame Citrus, her first novel, was named Book of the Year by numerous publications.
Clare Wigfall was born in Greenwich during the summer of 1976. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and London. Her highly acclaimed debut short story collection, The Loudest Sound and Nothing, was published in 2007. The following year she won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘The Numbers’ and was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She has also received the K. Blundell Trust Award for a young writer whose work enhances social consciousness, has been longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award, and was nominated by William Trevor for an E. M. Forster Award. Most recently she was awarded a residential fellowship at Schloss Solitude, which she plans to undertake in 2017. Having spent her twenties in Prague and another year in Edinburgh, she currently lives in Berlin with her husband and two daughters.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our huge thanks to everyone who has contributed to this anthology, particularly:
All our authors and their agents.
Clare Conville, Deborah Rogers and Zoe Waldie.
At Faber: Lee Brackstone, Alex Russell, Silvia Crompton, Mary Morris, Hannah Griffiths, Luke Bird, Kate Ward, Camilla Smallwood, Lisa Baker, Lizzie Bishop and Kate McQuaid.
At HarperCollins US: Cal Morgan and Katherine Nintzel.
At House of Anansi: Sarah MacLachlan, Kelly Joseph and Janie Yoon.
Rosalind Harvey and Eleanor Rees.
The Royal Literary Fund.
Luke Br
own, Jennifer Custer, James Garvey, Jarred McGinnis, Jon McGregor and Anne Meadows.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
SARAH HALL was born in Cumbria in 1974. She is the prize-winning author of five novels—Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, Daughters of the North, How to Paint a Dead Man, and The Wolf Border—as well as The Beautiful Indifference, a collection of short stories. The first story in the collection, “Butcher’s Perfume,” was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, a prize she won in 2013 for “Mrs Fox.”
PETER HOBBS grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, and now lives in London. He is the award-winning author of two novels, The Short Day Dying and In the Orchard, the Swallows, as well as a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a writer-in-residence for the literacy charity First Story.
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CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY GREGG KULICK
COVER ILLUSTRATIONS
© ERIC GOTTESMAN/DOVER PICTURA
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SEX AND DEATH. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs. Stories copyright © 2016 by the individual contributors. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in 2016 in the United Kingdom by Faber & Faber Limited.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
EPub Edition August 2016 ISBN 9780062354716
ISBN: 978-0-06-235470-9
16 17 18 19 20 OFF/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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