Browsing Tag

down below

23

The Torture Camp on Paradise Street by Stanislav Aseyev

Translated by Zenia Tompkins and Nina Murray

I faced a very tall man, dressed in camo and holding an AK‑47. He grabbed me by the neck and held me up against the wall while closing the door with his other hand. He was so massive that I wondered why he bothered with the machine gun at all.

An Unruled Body by Ani Gjika

By Ani Gjika

In Albania in the nineties … men in their twenties and thirties are hungry to align themselves with what they perceive as power … harassing girls and women wherever…

The Plural Island by Gesualdo Bufalino

Translated by Julia Conrad

For a Sicilian, understanding Sicily means understanding oneself. It means choosing to be absolved or condemned. And it means resolving the fundamental tension that plagues us, the oscillation between claustrophobia and claustrophilia, between a hatred and love of seclusion.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

I must have been about twelve. I was hunting around for some-thing interesting to look at. There was plenty of interesting stuff: with every death a pile of new objects appeared in our apartment, deposited just as they were, trapped in a sudden end state, because their previous owner, the only person who could have freed them, was no longer among the living.

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal

Translated by Paul Wilson

And sure enough, Blackie stopped paying attention to me, and then she began clawing at me and I had to take a rag, and then a blanket, and hold her down.

The Diaries of Lea Goldberg

Translated by Tsipi Keller

A pointless day in Brindisi. A terrible fatigue. Pain in my gut, and I fear that I’ll be sick throughout the trip. I’m now sitting in a restaurant…

American Fictionary by Dubravka Ugresic

Translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursac

My mother collects other people’s deaths, rattling them mournfully like coins in a piggy bank. “Did you know Petrović died?” asks Mother over the phone.

The Condition of Secrecy: Essays by Inger Christensen

Translated by Susanna Nied

When I was nine years old, the world too was nine years old. At least there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, earth and body as like as two pennies. And there was never a harsh word between us, for the simple reason that there were no words at all between us; we never uttered a word to each other, the world and I.

Making Spain Great Again

By Layla Benitez-James

I wanted to unequivocally condemn police violence while simultaneously feeling a knee jerk aversion to any movement working under a shared idea of nationalism.

The Nationsoul of My Dear Jon by Birkir Blær

Translated by Meg Matich

The most preposterous figure in Icelandic folklore is the indomitable wife of My Dear Jon who travels to the kingdom of heaven with the soul of her husband in a sack, to smuggle him into Paradise; she’s a woman who slings insults at the saints and slut shames the Virgin Mary before Jesus Christ himself arrives at the gates of heaven to bid her, with ceremonious tact, to get lost.

Par Amouricana

By Joshua Kleinberg

It’s not the threat of violence. It’s the questions I’m expected to answer before the violence that bother me. All stemming from premises I don’t agree with, but what are you going to get into a debate with a man who just caught you making out with his “domestic partner?”

Roller Skates by Dimitar “Shosho” Kotzev

Translated by Ekaterina Petrova

Zhoro “the Bird” was a Bulgarian immigrant in Melbourne. He was born in a village near the town of Plovdiv, where, going off in pursuit of his entire family’s happiness, he had left behind a wife and a daughter.

New York to Manchuria

By Christopher Impiglia

For my great-grandparents, as it was for most immigrants of their generation, the past was a hindrance. It was all about the future. A new life with new appliances and new cars and new names. Nothing old, as the old carried with it the weight of oppressive regimes, poverty, and social immobility.

A Fact of Survival

By Mina Hamedi

I saw him walking, black hair in knots and a bottle with the cap open held by his side. Leaning over the top, he brought his bottle, took a sip and stared at us.

My Father’s Eye

By Theophilus Kwek

Now that we live in the same house, it sits on a glass shelf in the hallway, a dark lens winking when the lights come on. A cataract of dust, invisible except at certain angles…

Lessons From the Darkness by Helena Janeczek

Translated by Frederika Randall

They caught her because she made a mistake. For months she had sailed right through their nets with her false passport, her bleached hair, her little heart-shaped medal reworked as a cross, her Polish spoken like a Pole and even her school-taught German spoken badly as only the Poles in Slesia did.

Leonora Carrington EuropeNow

Down Below by Leonora Carrington

By Leonora Carrington

Various events were taking place in the outside world: the collapse of Belgium, the entry of the Germans in France. All of this interested me very little and I had no fear whatsoever.

What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffe

Translated by Julia Sanches

She continues to divine the future—more so than the past, which she has almost completely forgotten. She has herself turned into Linka, the gypsy from Debrecen. Her Jewishness is a mixture of faith and superstition; a religion she has partly invented herself.