Writing Samples of Visiting European Authors

Excerpt from the novel RAPTUS by Svetoslav Nahum (Aka: Svet DiNahum). Excerpt contains the part in which a poem by the great ancient Chinese philosopher and poet Master Qu Yuan is cited. This Chinese wisdom serves for resolving the dramatic conflict in the novel “In connection with the complicated and asymmetric international situation…” He was   …Continue Reading

(Excerpt）I Never Wanted to Hang Myself I never wanted to hang myself. I find it unappealing. I had seen films that showed purple tongues hanging out of mouths, rope marks on necks, and hanging victims who, once the rope is cut, fall to the ground to spend eternity as a pile of nothing. Revolting. I   …Continue Reading

Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street Indrek Hargla (Extract)   The Prior was – naturally – in the scriptorium with his spectacles on, and reading, to Hinric’s surprise, Der Edelstein, moral tales by Ulrich Boner of the Berne Dominicans, translated from the Latin. ‘This is that same Melchior, eh?’ asked the Prior when   …Continue Reading

SISTERS IN MISERICORDIA By Colombe Schneck Translated by Adriana Hunter   Azul moves into an apartment in a two-storey building on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, with Moisés, Ximena and Miguel. Juan comes back once a year from his tour which takes him all the way to the Peruvian border. He brings back presents for   …Continue Reading

High Shadow   That first surgery wasn’t one. There stood mother, all I feared. After the fall I checked the wound, And I left it in the mirror’s memory.   I never made it all the way round morning. Sometimes noon would take till midnight. I hardly dared laugh. And by the time They extracted   …Continue Reading

Excerpt from GREEN GLOWING SKULL by Gavin Corbett   One Saturday afternoon when Jean Dotsy was a young child an American airplane came from over the border and scudded into the bog where her older brother Patrick did casual work on weekends. The pilot, a brown-haired man with a face that suggested he would go   …Continue Reading

Translator into English: Mārta Ziemelis   ANOTHER WOMAN   I was in third grade when I got up and solemnly announced that I didn’t have a father. I trembled on the inside when thirty pairs of surprised eyes looked at me. There was something between sympathy and doubt on the teacher’s face. “We need to   …Continue Reading

Three excerpts from The Piano Cemetery, by José Luís Peixoto   There’s no difference between what actually happened and what I kept distorting in my imagination, over and over again, across the years. There’s no difference between the dull pictures I remember, and the raw, cruel words I think I remember but which are merely   …Continue Reading

Europe Even now you peddle the story of the Turks At the gates of Vienna, dismantling their tents only as a ruse. And how masquerading as kebab vendors Even now they’re only waiting for the right moment To leap out from their kiosks and cut your throats.   No matter that your tribes are lost   …Continue Reading

—You know, Robert, I’ve been reading “To Tomorrow” and I really liked it, but   Robert Gris came down to the hotel lobby an hour and a half late. When he appeared, his face was swollen due to lack of sleep and last night’s vodka. He wanted a bite to eat. As he headed to   …Continue Reading

The Last of the Huelsenbecks Translated from the original German by Angus Baigent © by Rowohlt Berlin Publishers Excerpt from the beginning   Being the Fifth Wheel at a Mass Grave   I don’t know. Would I have gone to Viktor’s funeral if I’d known it would set off a chain of events that would   …Continue Reading