Photo by Michael AndrewsOn her eightieth birthday, a woman waits for a telephone call in this story inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet.” How can everything change without our realizin…
Fiction
- Image: © Masha watercolorIn this story, Hungarian author Zsófia Bán writes into a little-known episode from Hungary’s tangled and traumatic pre–and post–World War II history, centered aro…
- First published in two parts in 1979 and 1983, Among the Bieresch was praised by critics, winning the Rauris Literature Prize and the Döblin Prize. Forthcoming in English translation fro…
- Photo by Brook Ward (Flickr.com/brookward)Some years ago a diabolical fire, triggered by lightning, ravaged Donmark cathedral. It was a terrible tragedy, though fortunately no lives were lost an…
- Photo by Eduard Kreis/FlickrDeciding to throw off life’s stagnation, a woman moves from Finland to Italy and takes up tossing coins in fountains. But just how much change can she…
- Photo by Cranky Messiah/Flickr …
- In late-twentieth-century India, a boy whose mother is a stage actress grows up in a traumatic relationship with a viscerally compelling but dying art form—commercial theatre. The sprawl…
- A man finishes a cedar hall closet, a wedding gift for his wife, but is the time he spends creating something perfect revealing something flawed?Photo by Randall EppSam found h…
- Photo by Victoria Calligo y SolivellaWhile Slovene writer Polona Glavan’s debut novel explored the journey of young Europeans, in the following story, two widowed neighbors…
- Photo by Noel Reynolds/Flickr“Birds” is one of the interrelated stories in Tianqiao shang de moshushi (Magician on the overpass), published in Taiwan in 2011. The entire…
- Photo by Fernando Rodríguez/FlickrZugzwang: a chess position where any move is disadvantageous. Eduard Màrquez applies the term to his characters who, he observes, “are subjected to forces an…
- Alberto Chimal published these stories in Spanish as “An Alphabet of Twitter-Stories: A Study by Horacio Kustos” (@hkustos) in summer 2012. In a self-interview Chimal published i…
- Photo by Tortured Mind Photography/FlickrOnce again using the lens provided by detective fiction, Leonardo Padura magnifies various aspects of Cuban reality for his readers.…
- Marie and Frank were lifelong renters, and though moving their things out of a house was like unloading a ship, their old house didn’t sail away. It sat there, on the South Dakota plains, waiting—…
- Photo Shannalee/FlickrIn the first translation of his work into English, South Korean writer Kim Kyŏnguk imagines an ad executive confronting a man who may be his for…
- In a haze of marijuana and beer, a vacationing photojournalist discusses the state of humanity with a West Indian boy. What are we without our addictions, our distractions, and are we doomed if we…
- Apologia? Manifesto? Confessional? In this stream-of-consciousness narrative, a Havana drag queen tells her story. “Fátima, Queen of the Night,” published here for the first time, won Cuban writer…
- Frightening dreams, rejection, and secret compromises: a middle-aged Bengali widow living in a compound struggles to maintain her dignity and independence while supporting her insolent grandson.…
- Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958) is a highly regarded Japanese novelist. She was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1994 for Hebi o fumu (Tread on a snake). To date, her…
- Every couple inhabit a private world of their own, and share an intimate language of words, silence, and gestures that only they understand. Such is a love story between a deaf husb…
- A seemingly ordinary day in Nairobi ends in tragedy and forces a confrontation between a city woman and her husband's tribe.Photo: Meena KadriThe matatu minibus was doing eighty miles an hour…
- Ukrainian writer Tanya Malyarchuk’s work fuses Chekhov-like psychological portraits of characters with magical realism. Many of her most fascinating narratives focus on her life growing up amid th…