By Artem Chapeye
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

He even felt jealous of that old lady. The crowd splashed out of the metro into the Akademmistechko Station. People flooded the stairs from wall to wall. And that old woman was walking in the opposite direction with a vengeful look and squabbling loudly. “This is a mob! People can’t even get through!” She genuinely viewed herself as separate, as different. As if she wasn’t a part of the mob. He felt jealous of that lady because it just didn’t work for him like that anymore. 

Read More

by Lyubko Deresh
Translated from the Ukrainian by Patrick John Corness

So, von Liebig was a courteous person. In his lectures, however contentious the issue under debate might be, he always acted with decorum when speaking of his critics, noting their strengths and praising their achievements. This completely won over Stefan Lange, who was at the time a third year student in the languages department of the University of Vienna.

Read More

by Victoria Amelina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

After Tarik was gone, and the Egyptian government had yielded its positions, I closed my laptop and walked up to the window. It was spring, and it wasn’t yellow leaves, as on that distant day in the fall of 1989, but now the white petals of an old pear tree that swirled in the yard between the hanging linens and the maples, abloom with the green heartlings of newborn life.

Read More

by Lucie Faulerová
Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker

It was the worst moment of her life—except for all the others, that is. It was the worst moment of my life—except for all the others, that is. Except for the ones behind me now, waving to me with that look of satisfaction from a job well done, and except for the ones looking forward to me, shuffling their feet in anticipation, watching out for my arrival, chins lifted and arms spread wide.

Read More

by Marek Šindelka
Translated from the Czech by Nathan Fields

The grain is smooth and shines like a pearl. Hardly half a millimeter in length. Its origin is unclear. Maybe the remains of undersea mountains on the bottom of the ancient ocean, maybe a tiny particle of Saharan sand transported by subtropical wind from continent to continent. Maybe (and this is most probable) it is just ordinary debris without meaning or past. The grain, along with a number of others, is stuck onto a tiny piece of apple pulp full of putrid bacteria. The pulp glistens and ferments.

Read More

by Bianca Bellová
Translated from the Czech by Julia Sutton-Mattocks

There’s no avoiding it. Everyone suffers from it up here, even if they don’t speak about it. It grips your bowels like a citrus juicer. Vertigo seizes you with such strength that it paralyses you right from the tips of your fingers to your respiratory muscles. You have to resist it from the very first and crowd it out, as fast as you can, or it will eat you alive.

Read More

by Jana Šrámková
Translated from the Czech by Andrea Goldbergerová

And then there was an awful humming sound, and it already fell down, flying crossways, it just cut out a portion of our house from the side like this. Wouldn’t you go hide in the cellar? We would, we had been there three times at night, but there was no time, I don’t know why they did not sound the alarm, nobody was expecting it.

Read More

by Alena Mornštajnová
Translated from the Czech by Andrea Goldbergerová

That year, the smell of disinfectant filled the air instead of spring. The houses were huddled to one another, as if they wanted to be comforted in the desolation also surrounding the figures walking through the town streets. Feuds and neighborly quarrels—which seemed important a few weeks ago—were put aside and all conversation revolved only around powerlessness, fear and disease.

Read More

by Kateryna Kalytko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Gordynchuk

The icon rode in the wagon with him amid sacks full of last year’s potatoes. This grim man in a clunker with a wagon has been Osyp's only chance for a ride on the way there, but at least he was able to stretch his legs out. The potatoes were sprouting; he could even hear their shoots moving in the sacks. The fabric in which the icon was wrapped, slid down a little, revealing a corner of a colorful canvas, and a stray bee, woken by an early warm spell, tried to land on it. Osyp saw this as a good sign and didn’t even worry that the bee would inevitably die once it got colder again.

Read More

by Kateryna Khinkulova
Translated from the Ukrainian by Oleksandra Gordynchuk

I did not bury Tanya – I scattered her ashes in Paris. All this romantic appeal – dying somewhere but not in Paris, bridges over the Seine, whatever – really got under my skin. I stood on one of the bridges, Bolik sleeping in his stroller. It wasn’t the Mirabeau Bridge, but I could see the Eiffel Tower and the Musee d’Orsay from it anyway. I didn’t have enough courage to do this during the day, so we came late at night when it got completely dark.

Read More

by Sophie Gertrude Strohmeier

A brief encounter in Brussels at Christmas, then the flight eastwards: a housewife and a shopgirl caught up in an amour fou that will lose itself, unresolved, in a criss crossing of limbs and European landscapes, finally coming to a standstill in Trieste, along the Slovenian border. At the edge of the Western world, one burning question: where do lovers go when all has been escaped from?

Read More

by Alisa Ganieva
Translated from the Russian by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The three law enforcement men had already been clicking around the parquet of the downstairs rooms for quite a while, two citizens deputized to witness the search trudging along behind them, gaping at the fancy décor of the Lyamzin house.

Read More

by Oleksiy Chupa
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

These days no one would even remember who Gerhardt Frei was. Yet, some sixty-odd years ago, this name ended up at the center of most kitchen table conversations throughout the city. After the final rout of the Third Reich, he, along with thousands of other German POWs, was sent here, to our part of Eastern Ukraine, for construction work. Frei was taken prisoner all the way out in the suburbs of Berlin.

Read More

by Serhiy Zhadan
Translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

The story I’m about to tell could’ve only happened at Christmas time. It has all the traditional elements of a Christmas story: the Magi, the messengers, the angels singing in a pomegranate-red December sky, and a sense of mystery living inside every one of us. If you listen carefully, this story will, if anything, seem to imply that mystery in its pristine form always exists somewhere around us. All you have to do is stop acting like you’re above it all and try to feel its presence. 

Read More