Published by Profile Books An act of charity that goes horribly wrong, a travelling bag that when opened leads to a man’s death, a ghostly boy that only his friend can see, a mysterious co-worker with a strange smell, and a misguided attempt to raise the dead. These are the five stories in this collection. …
Continue reading The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories: Susan Hill
Translated from Romanian by Julian SemilianPublished by Penguin This collection of three short stories and two novellas, set mainly in Bucharest, was written during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime and published in 1989, the year his regime fell. Nostalgia was originally published under the title Visul ("The Dream"), which seems appropriate: the pieces are fairly dreamlike and …
Translated from Lao by Bounheng Inversin, Roger Rumpf, Jacqui Chagnon, Thipason Phimviengkham and William GallowayPublished by University of Washington Press A poor cobbler finds a way to make his contribution to his country's war effort; a young man offers strangers lifts on his bicycle; and a young woman tries to return a silver belt she …
Continue reading Mother’s Beloved—Stories from Laos: Outhine Bounyavong
Published by Penguin and Oxford University Press “I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...”The Treasure of Abbot Thomas M.R. James is one of the best—if not the best—ghost story writer in the English language. Born in 1862, he went on to …
Translated from Portuguese by Helena Cavendish de Moura with Andrew Michael BrownPublished in a bilingual edition by Casa Forte Press Lula Falcão is an award-winning journalist, political advocate and writer. His criticism of the current President Jai Bolsonaro has landed him on the list of “intellectuals to be watched”. This is the first of Falcão’s …
Continue reading Vultures in the Living Room and Other Stories: Lula Falcão
Translated from Polish by Jennifer CroftPublished by Fitzcarraldo Editions “Clearly I did not inherit whatever gene it is that makes it so that when you linger in a place you start to put down roots. I’ve tried, a number of times but my roots have always been shallow; the littlest breeze could always blow me …
Selected and translated by M. Asaduddin with additional translations by Ralph RussellPublished by Penguin “In my stories, I’ve put down everything with objectivity. Now, if people find them obscene, let them go to hell. It’s my belief that experiences can never be obscene if they are based on authentic realities of life.”[1] Ismat Chugtai is …
Continue reading Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chugtai
Published by Mantle This is an intriguing collection of short stories, many of them set in the 1800s. A doctor finds himself blanking out regularly. The seizure is heralded by the smell of chestnuts. When he comes to, he finds that, instead of passing out, he had carried on with what he had been doing …
Continue reading A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth: Daniel Mason
Translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Shlesinger and Yardenne Greenspan A child encourages a man to jump off the top of a building, believing that the man is a superhero and will fly. A man keeps the compacted wreck of a car in his living room. A goldfish comes down …
The short stories in this collection capture the small but seismic shifts in a person’s life: the distraction of a tutor whose wife has left him; the regret of a woman who has walked out of her marriage of 30 years; and a woman realizing that her dream house still harbours the spirits of its …
Continue reading The Ayah and Other Stories: Chanis Fernando-Boisard
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