Fiction from Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Margriet de Moor, Josip Novakovich, and Laura van den Berg

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The woman who had conceived me didn't get up from the chair.  The child she held in her arms was sucking his thumb on one side of his mouth--maybe a tooth was coming in.  Both of them looked at me, and he stopped his monotonous crying.  I didn't know I had such a little brother.

        "You're here," she said.  "Put down your things."

        I lowered my eyes to the smell of shoes that wafted from the bag if I moved it even slightly.  From behind the closed door of the room at the back came a tense, sonorous snoring.  The baby started whining again and turned to the breast, dripping saliva on the sweaty, faded cotton flowers.  

        "Why don't you close the door?" the mother curtly asked the girl, who hadn't moved.
--From A Girl Returned, a novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2019).  Originally published in Italian as L'Arminuta (Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.: Torino, Italy, 2017).   

I am grateful to my husband for this soft wooden floor, laid with his own two hands.  I know that he salvaged these planks of oak from a scrapyard.  I even know that the wood originally came from the Heide Hotel, an old hunting lodge.  I walk a floor for which a tidy sum was once paid.  As he worked away in the living room--I can still hear the short, intense blasts of hammering--I was running an angled paintbrush along the frame of the door that leads down to the cellar.  I remember how pleased I was with the color, a grayish green that even now, almost fifteen years later, still seems just right.  I recall the stiffness in my fingers when the paint that had dripped down the side of the brush began to dry.  I didn't have much space to work in.  I see very clearly that the sweep of my clumsy efforts was hemmed in by a pile of secondhand chairs and boxes crammed with wedding gifts.  While the Chinese bowls, the tablecloth embroidered with irises, the cocktail shaker, and goodness knows what else are items I still possess and see almost every day, Ton, my young husband, has vanished without a trace.

--From Sleepless Night, a novel by Margriet de Moor, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (New Vessel Press, 2019).  First published in Dutch as Slapeloze nacht (De Bezige Bij: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016).

Ivan Medvedich was washing his silvery mustache after eating a slice of dark bread with honey when a whistle cut through the air, deepened in frequency, and sank into an explosion that shook the house so that a bar of soap slid from the mirror ledge into the sink.

        "Lord have mercy!" his wife Estera said.  "What was that?"

        "The Chetniks, what else."

        Soon, another whistle and another explosion.

        "Run for cover!" Estera shouted.

        "What cover?  This is the safest place in the house."

        Ivan had built the house alone--actually, with a little help from his oldest, flat-footed son, Daniel, who had groaned more than he worked.  It took Ivan twenty years of careful labor to finish the house, but one thing he had skipped: a cellar, perhaps because snakes had nested and floods crept into the cellar of his childhood home.  God is my fortress and my strength was his motto.  But now, in addition to God, a cellar would help.

--From Honey in the Carcase, a collection of short stories by Josip Novakovich (Dzanc Books, 2019).  This section is the beginning of the title story, "Honey in the Carcase," which was first published in The Threepenny Review (Autumn 1993).  This story was later included in The Pushcart Prize XIX (1994-1995) and reprinted in The Literary Review in 2019 as a TLR Share.   

Eventually I come upon a twenty-four-hour diner called Helen's Kitchen.  The door chimes as I enter.  The diner is empty except for two waitresses, standing behind the counter like strange twins, one on the left-hand side, the other on the right.  They are both wearing forest-green aprons and holding white coffee carafes.  They are wearing the same glasses, with pink cat-eye frames; their hair is pulled back into matching French braids.  For a moment, I think Beth Butler's husband has murdered me after all and Helen's Kitchen is the afterlife.  The woman on the left puts down her carafe.  She walks over and rips the the tape from my mouth.

        "How can we help you?" she says. 

--From I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, a collection of short stories by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).  This section is from "Your Second Wife" (pages 159-173 in the hardcover).  A slightly different version of this story was published in Lenny Letter (August 28, 2018).    

Fiction by Hye-Young Pyun, Lena Andersson, and Tove Jansson

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Danger warnings are more common than actual danger.  And yet when danger finally does strike, it does so without warning.  That was why the man thought nothing of the quarantine notices and infectious disease prevention regulations posted all around the airport.  He knew that the more caution signs there were, the less danger he was in.  As if overhearing the man's thoughts, a health inspector in a hazmat suit who was scanning the temperatures of disembarking passengers looked hard at the thermometer and gave him a warning frown.  Was it the man's slight fever?  The stink of alcohol wafting off of him?  He clamped his mouth shut and slipped a hand up to his forehead.  It felt like the lid of a rice cooker set to warm.
--From City of Ash and Red, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2018). Originally published in Korean as Jaewa Ppalgang (Changbi Publishers: South Korea, 2010).  Please note: this book contains some specific violence that may not be for everyone. 

Traffic was at a standstill, the cars blocked by a crowd of pedestrians in the middle of the street.  Their voices were nearly loud enough to drown out the blaring of horns.  What had happened?  She could feel everyone's eyes on her.  Could sense them stopping mid-sentence to stare at her.  Stepping back to open a path before she could get too close.  Turning their heads when her eyes met theirs.  Whispering to the people next to them.

        Of course, if she'd actually found the courage to lift her head and look, she would have seen that the others barely registered her presence, but she couldn't manage it.  Se-oh let her head drop further and further.  Any moment now someone was going to recognize her and grab her by the throat or curse at her and demand to know where she'd been hiding.  She hurried away from them.  

--From The Law of Lines, a novel by Hye-Young Pyun, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade Publishing, 2020).  Originally published in Korean as Seonui beopchik (Muhakdongne Publishing Group: South Korea).

Every other weekend, Hugo went away.  He said he was going to Borås, where his frail mother lived, but there was something about these trips to Borås that did not quite add up.  There was an unusual vacuum around them, the way unusual vacuums usually surround lies.  The baffling thing was that there was no reason to doubt that the trips were genuine, in the same way that there was no reason he should name a place where he was not going.  But there was still something not quite right.  

        On one of the evenings when they met over food and wine and then went back to his studio, [Ester] saw a train ticket sticking out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of a chair.  When he went to the toilet she got up and walked round the room, looked at the art works on the walls and gave the ticket a slight tweak, so light that it hardly counted as an act.

        The ticket was from the previous weekend.  Stockholm-Malmö return, it said.  Not a hint of Borås.

--From Willful Disregard, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death (Other Press, 2016).  First published in the United Kingdom by Picador (2015).  Originally published in Swedish as Egenmäktigt förfarande – en roman om kärlek (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2013).  This segment is from page 38 in the paperback. 

In the past few months at home in Stockholm, she'd written her first play, which was to be performed the coming autumn at a country theater in Västerås.  The play would send her life in a new direction, but of this she knew nothing yet.  The production was called Threesome and was a melancholy reflection on the agonies of love.  Ester Nilsson had striven for psychological realism, and that's exactly what she thought she'd achieved, but the critics would call it absurdist.

        ...

        Threesome was about a man trapped in an unhappy marriage who meets another woman but can't bring himself to leave his wife.  The play was not prophetic.  Nothing is prophetic.  What may look like a prediction is really just a heightened awareness of what has previously come to pass.  What has happened will happen again sooner or later, somewhere, sometime.  And it's likely that it will happen again to the same person because people have their patterns.  

--From Acts of Infidelity, a novel by Lena Andersson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Other Press, 2018).  First published in English in the United Kingdom by Macmillan Publishers International Limited (2018).  Originally published in Swedish as Utan personligt ansvar (Natur & Kultur: Stockholm, Sweden, 2014).  These segments are from pages 3-5 in the paperback.  

On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a squirrel on the boat beach.  It sat motionless near the water, hardly visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a living squirrel, and she hadn't seen anything alive for a very long time.  The gulls didn't count, they were always flying away.  They were like the wind across the waves and the grass. 

--From "The Squirrel," a short story Tove Jansson.  This story (pp. 38-55) and "The Summer Child" (pp. 150-165) were included in The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (New York Review Books, 2014). The stories were first published in Swedish by Schildts Förlags AB (Finland).  English translations first appeared in several books (Sort of Books: London, 2006-2013).