Photo: Gerry Paille/FlickrIn this story from a snowy Greenland, a woman reluctantly joins her husband in the woods for a grouse hunt. Ready . . . aim . . . She’s still in bed. S…
Fiction
Tamas Galambos, Summer, 1981, oil on canvas. A detail from Galambos’s painting also appears on the cover of García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude reprinted by Pengu…
Photo: Funkyfood London - Paul Williams / AlamyAlong the shore of the Danube, a cat reflects on world history and human nature. From Oppenheimer to Donne to Stalin to Ana Pauker the musin…
Photo by Jo Christian OterhalsIf, the woman thinks, she were an airplane that crashed and someone located the little black box, that would be the sentence they found, to hear water, but n…
Gustav Klimt, Allée in the Gardens of Schloss Kammer, 1912, oil on canvas. Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria / Artothek / Bridgeman imagesRide the tram thro…
Photo: flickr.com/people/duluoz_catsWith Neil Young playing in the background, a New Zealand woman living in Australia recrosses the ocean over a game of Checkers. Luke shakes t…
Photo by Ariel DovasStasis and disruption go head to head in this story from Macedonia.It’s not clear whether my husband is going to be ambassador for much longer, as he might be rec…
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. – Robert FrostEven from a distance we could tell something was wrong with the wall. When we went out to the pasture the ground seeme…
Photo by Soffie HicksIn this story by Brazil’s nominee for the Nobel Prize, a young girl will let nothing stop her from attending Carnival, not even her dying father.The blue-and-whi…
A broken foot is poor luck and a nuisance. It cancels everything from hikes to trips to Germany. It gives your insurance company an opportunity to feast and acquaints you with an orthopedist, often mo…
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…
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.…
Photo Nicholas A. Tonelli 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 the…- 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…