“One Autumn evening I was sitting at home, writing a story about love. Simply about love. About love and nothing but. A young man meets a girl. Through the narrow alleys of some little seaside town, they reach the sea and plod along the beach… Deserted. Dusky. Empty of people. Because it’s already November. Winter. […]
“Perhaps he’s gone crazy, it occurs to me. Or have I gone crazy? The inspector inside me applies her most powerful lever – my conscience – but I can no longer weep. Even my tears are stuck somewhere beneath my eyelids. I’ve been living on the trolleybus for two weeks now. The passengers are peculiar. […]
“That New Year little Mensur Ćeman learned that Grandfather Frost really did exist, but that he was not the kind old man from the Coca-Cola ad bringing colorfully wrapped presents for the children—he was an infidel arsonist, and it was because of him that he now lived at his Uncle Irfan’s and had to go […]
“These are pursuits which escape his comprehension, though he knows they exist, that all this human matter and its temporal framework are what the city feeds on: what would happen if all these people suddenly vanished into thin air, if the children never went back to school and their parents failed to appear punctually and […]
“The pens… the pencils… the paper… look… I’ve been writing,” I said to him, taking my wet hands out of the fridge again. Water began to drip onto the mess of paper on the kitchen bench. “What are these squiggles? What on earth have you been doing?” He started to grab my little hurricanes and […]
Milan Kundera wasn’t the only Czech writer to leave Czechoslovakia for France in the 1970s. Living a shadowy existence in another country is the subject of Lubomír Martínek’s story “Refugee” translated by Charles Sabatos. “Because the harbor was such a favored refuge for people escaping from various regimes, a lot of former political prisoners lived […]
Greeks Go Home to Die is Polish writer Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki’s most recently published novel, having been brought out by Znak earlier in 2013. The novel’s main character is the son of a Greek communist guerilla forced to leave for the Eastern Bloc after their defeat in Greece’s civil war. The novel alternates between the boy’s […]
“Alevtina” is a short story by Dmitri Novoselov, translated by Will Firth, recounting a woman’s odyssey through different husbands, lovers and wild turns of fortune whose chaos is highly suggestive of the post-Soviet Russia during which her adult life has played out. Read more Sunday European Fiction Photo – Russian graffiti that says “Kitchen and […]
“They’ll never understand my love,” Marko Redstarski told his two friends one afternoon. “I understand you entirely,” the journalist said. “Me too,” the musician nodded. “And they think I’m practicing sabotage!” the artist went on. “They want to rob the revolution of its charm, its beauty and mysticism, its solemnity…” This bit of dialogue comes […]
“Look at this be-me-ne,” he’d say unfurling a hand-woven striped headscarf, “The El-Dzhamans of Baghdad wore them on their heads. The old El-Dzhaman — by the way, he let me have it for a sky-high price — told me that it once belonged to Queen Be-me-ne from the clan of El-Dzhamans. She strangled her husband […]
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