Fiction by Dorthe Nors, Etgar Keret, and Lydia Davis

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Sonja is sitting in a car, and she's brought her dictionary along.  It's heavy, and sits in the bag on the backseat.  She's halfway through her translation of Gösta Svensson's latest crime novel, and the quality was already dipping with the previous one.  Now's the time I can afford it, she thought, and so she looked for driving schools online and signed up with Folke in Frederiksburg.  The theory classroom was small and blue and reeked of stale smoke and locker rooms, but the theory itself went well.  Besides Folke, there was only one other person Sonja's age in the class, and he was there because of drunk driving, so he kept to himself.  Sonja usually sat there and stuck out among all the kids, and for the first aid unit the instructor used her as a model.  He pointed to the spot on her throat where they were supposed to imagine her breathing had gotten blocked.  He did the Heimlich on her, his fingers up in her face, inside her collar, up and down her arms.  At one point he put her into a stranglehold, but that wasn't the worst of it.  The worst was when they had to do the exercises themselves.  It was humiliating to be placed in the recovery position by a boy of eighteen.  
--From Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a novel by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press, 2018).  Originally published as Spejl, skulder, blink (Gyldendal: Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016).  First published in English by Pushkin Press, London.

"What did you buy it for?"
"Because I need it," she said.  "A lot of things around here need gluing."
"Nothing around here needs gluing," I said. "I wish I understood why you buy all this stuff."
"For the same reason I married you," she murmured. "To help pass the time."
I didn't want to fight, so I kept quiet, and so did she.
--From "Crazy Glue," a very short story by Etgar Keret, LA Weekly (September 26, 2001).  It was published in his collection The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 5-7.  "Crazy Glue" was translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger.

In the summer of '76, they remodeled our house and added another bathroom.  That was my mother's private bathroom, with green tiles, white curtains, and a kind of small drawing board she could put on her knees to do crossword puzzles on.  The door of this new bathroom had no lock because it was my mother's and no one else was allowed to go in anyway.  We were very happy that summer. 
--From "The Summer of '76," a very short story by Etgar Keret, from his collection The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 169-171.  "The Summer of '76" was translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly.  She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed.  We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. 

--From "Fear," one of five very short stories by Lydia Davis, Conjunctions, Issue 24 (Spring 1995).

Minna spends her days in the Royal Library. 
Minna has to work without noise.
Minna's working on a paper sonata.
The paper sonata consists of tonal rows.
Minna writes soundless music.
Minna is a tad avant-garde.
...
It's morning.
Lars has left again.
Lars is always in a hurry to get out of bed.
The bed is a snug nest.
Minna's lying in it, but
Lars is on his bike and gone.
Lars bikes as hard as he can in the direction of City Hall Square.
Lars makes the pigeons rise.
Lars has deadlines.
--From Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, a novella by Dorthe Nors, from her book So Much for That Winter, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press, 2016).  Part of Minna Needs Rehearsal Space (Minna mangler et øvelokale) was published in English and Danish by Asymptote.

Fiction and poetry by Domenico Starnone, Sayaka Murata, Mary White, and more

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One evening Betta called, crankier than usual, wanting to know if I felt up to minding her son while she and her husband took part in a mathematics conference in Cagliari.  I'd been living in Milan for a couple of decades, and the thought of decamping to Naples, to the old house I'd inherited from my parents, and where my daughter had been living since prior to getting married, didn't thrill me.  I was over seventy and, having been a widower for some time, had lost the habit of living with others.  I only felt comfortable in my own bed and in my own bathroom.  Furthermore, I'd undergone, a few weeks earlier, a small surgical procedure which, even in the clinic, seemed to have done more harm than good.  Though the doctors poked their faces day and night into my room, to tell me that everything had gone fine, my hemoglobin was low, my ferritin was poor, and one afternoon, I saw small heads, plaster-white, stretching toward me from the opposite wall.
--From Trick, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2018). Originally published in Italian as Scherzetto (Einaudi: Torino, Italy, 2016).

The morning period is passing normally in the brightly lit box of the convenience store, I feel.  Visible outside the windows, polished free of fingerprints, are the figures of people rushing by.  It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move.  I am one of those cogs, going round and round.  I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.
--From Convenience Store Woman, a novel by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, 2018).  Originally published in Japanese as Konbini ningen (Tokyo, Japan: Bungeishunjū Ltd., 2016). 

When my fiancé left for the war 
Which is still going on 
I prepared increasingly elaborate foods
--From "Expectation Management," a poem by Mary White, Communion Arts Journal (June 2019).

Like, he's definitely cheating.  He's not even trying to hide it anymore.  He's such a piece of shit.  Take a left here.  And the worst part is she's not going to say anything either.  I mean, she's basically just waiting for him to leave her.  It's honestly stressful just being in the same room as them.
--From Bottled, a graphic novel by Chris Gooch (Top Shelf Productions, 2017). 

I didn't belong there.  I wandered through the succession of rooms, with a glass of overly acidic champagne in my hand.  I looked at the other guests.  Their self-confidence, the way they held their heads.  Their facial expressions.  They formed familiar little clusters, burst out laughing, glanced over at rival groups, occasionally glanced at the canvases, gushed noisily, turned away, murmured a spicy anecdote or scathing commentary into the ear of an acolyte, demolishing the opus they had just praised in the blink of an eye.  
--From Exposed, a novel by Jean-Philippe Blondel, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New Vessel Press, 2019).  Originally published in French as La mise à nu (Libella: Paris, France, 2018).

Living alone in his dead uncle's cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick.  He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he'd exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather.
--From "The Coast of Leitrim," a short story by Kevin Barry, The New Yorker (October 15, 2018), pp. 70-75.