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Often told in women’s voices, McConnell’s stories in this collection range in time from the 1930s to the Covid-19 pandemic and take place in a transatlantic world, ranging from Italy and Puerto Rico to California, New York City, and the American Midwest. While McConnell’s women sometimes find themselves through their lovers, they also strive for…
“I need to travel to purge myself of Sweden and Swedish stupidity,” wrote August Strindberg in a letter to his editor in 1884. Renowned for his itchy feet, the celebrated Swedish playwright travelled extensively throughout his lifetime, living in dozens of different places in Stockholm and abroad. Yet he spent the vast majority of his…
The central premise of The Abyss by the Tamil writer Jeyamohan is the philosophical question of existence: What makes us human? Or, to put it more bluntly, as Jeyamohan lays out in an interview with his translator, Suchitra Ramachandran: “If you subject human beings to an acid test, what remains?” To explore this question, Jeyamohan…
In all the years I’ve lived as a writer — which is to say, all the years of my adult life — that moment of facing a blank screen or a blank piece of paper and typing the number “1” never got any easier.
Early in Hanna Johansson’s Body Double, two women discuss the destabilizing experience of being left behind. The women, Naomi and Laura, have met by chance in a department store cafe after Naomi accidentally takes Laura’s coat, which is identical to hers. She returns it immediately, and over coffee Naomi confesses that the experience of being…
The latest short story collection by Xu Xi, Horizon Hong Kong features Hong Kongers forging relationships and means of survival in their evolving home city and abroad. Split into five sections, the collection depicts the changing shape of Hong Kong, particularly in the years before and after its handover from the British to the Chinese…