Literature is filled with requests for cigarettes, but I doubt there are many that resemble the one found in Ondrej Štefánik’s “To Sacrifice Yourself For Someone Else”: “Do you have a smoke?” I hear a squeaky voice from somewhere. It’s not the voice in my head. I shiver. I look around. Not a soul. “So? […]
B O D Y’s series of European fiction in translation, Saturday European Fiction, kicked off one year ago and has since seen the publication of short stories and novel excerpts from almost every country in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Spain, from authors young and old, living and dead, previously unpublished in English […]
He stepped into the bushes to fool around a little. “What can I say about Grigory,” he thought later, “when I don’t even know whether I exist?” From The Sublimes by Yuri Mamleyev, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. This highly influential cult classic from 1968 has never before been translated into English and […]
“When Phoebe Hicks conducted her first séance, when she became the first medium in New England, when her fame began to entice other women to embark on a similar career, no one foresaw, of course, what would distinguish her from her successors. This difference, not so crucial at first glance, fundamentally influenced Phoebe’s story.” From […]
“Sasha noticed some busses bearing the coat of arms with a fanged beast. The curtains in the bus windows trembled. People were sitting in those busses, waiting for an opportunity to step out, to run out, clutching rubber mallets in tough fists, looking angrily for somebody to hit, and to hit them with flourish, to […]
“While the gypsy woman held a garment in the air, offering it to the pineapple vendor, her teat slid from the mouth of her child, who squealed in hunger. The gypsy shoved her nipple, stiff and dripping milk, back between her child’s lips, his mouth filthy and his eyes sealed shut with pus.” From Josef […]
“Have I told you the story about the guy who butchered hogs?” “Which guy?” “The one who was in the Foreign Legion. Have I told you that one?” “Is it for real?” And so starts the very short story, “One Big Mess” by Croatian writer and author of Our Man in Iraq Robert Perišić in […]
“About Death itself he knew everything: it would be difficult to find someone who could outdo him in his knowledge of its causes and effects, its kinds and types. Perhaps he would not excel at questions of its usefulness: not one of his teachers or rulers had instructed him about such secrets because the question […]
“I was flying along at Uncle Gleb’s side, holding his hand. He yanked me off the escalator—you can’t look back—and into the underground snow palace, a kingdom of marble and white stone, with pillars instead of columns, with a never-ending dome stretching to infinity instead of a ceiling. Never in my life, my life on […]
“The Romany and their tragicomic lives, the lives of the wheeler-dealers, the inhabitants of settlements and other peculiar characters and figures are the subject matter of the book. The trafficker Ferdy was promised the young and beautiful Sabina as compensation of a debt, but she fled and found the love of her life. The book […]
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