books @ cc.

by Roberto Bolaño

Selected from Editorial Anagrama’s collections, the short stories in Last Evenings on Earth were previously published in English in The New Yorker, Grand Street, and Tin House. Written in direct, short sentences, one feels, as Bolaño said (or so according to the book jacket), “the melancholy folklore of exile” pervading these stories.

by Danilo Kiš (1983)

A collection of metaphysical short stories set in various times and places, luminously darkened with the themes of fate and death’s impenetrability. With strong political undercurrents and recondite personal insights, Kiš’s reworked facts, Gnostic, Biblical, Koran myths and legends, political situations, rural folktales, depicting the delicate multitude and vicissitude of human life, perhaps with less faux vérité style than A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, yet with the same finely-crafted prose, subtle ironies and detachment that is both powerful and constrained.

by Danilo Kiš (1976)

A Tomb for Boris Davidovich consists of seven different yet casually interlinked short stories about revolutionaries, mostly centering around the Russian Revolution and its blind Stalinist totalitarianism that arbitrarily consumes its children. In its loose labyrinth of characters, loose deeds, occurences and details artfully described, readers find shadows of Borgesian influence. While the literary polemic with Borges is unmistakably deliberate with his faux documentary style (particularly A Universal History of Iniquity), Kiš’ lyrical mastery is all the more remarkably powerful in his detached yet delicate constructions of the grim subjects.

by Edogawa Rampo (1956)

A lucidly-translated collection of short mystery stories , Japanese Tales gives English-language readers a spell-binding peek into the works of Edogawa Rampo, “Japan’s most famous mystery writer”. (I first knew about the name from the Indonesian-licensed manga Detektif Conan  by Aoyama Gosho, and Febby then acquaint me further to Rampo’s popularity among Japanese readers.)

by Felisberto Hernández

One reads Hernández’ stories feeling as if drifting through fluid, phantasmagorical trance, animistic worlds where everyday objects take a life of their own, eliciting delicate forgotten responses, thoughts, feelings and memories. There are fifteen stories in this book, three of which are slightly longer pieces (The Stray Horse, The Daisy Dolls, The Flooded House), all of them inevitably in one way or another relate to a piano.

An Anthology
by Nadine Gordimer (ed.) (2004)

Nadine Gordimer asked twenty writers she admired if they would — without any fee or royalty — submit a story for a fundraising anthology, with all proceeds going to Treatment Action Campaign in aid of HIV/AIDS. While the premise is risky — and might involuntarily bring to cynical mind the cringe-worthy fiasco of Live 8, rest assured that the collection offers a worthy representation (and cause) for a literary endeavour. Although it won’t stop any nitpicking, admittedly it’s not that often that we get a one-stop collection of wide-ranging writers in a popular press.

and Other Stories
by Nadine Gordimer (1991)

While the subject matters — the (moral and psychological tensions of) life in a racially-divided country — would normally be treated in a political manner, in this book Gordimer observes and writes stories with seemingly no committed specific political ideologies.

Fables for the Cybernetic Age
by Stanisław Lem (1975)

Aptly subtitled “Fables for the Cybernetic Age”, The Cyberiad is a collection of fairy-tale-ish science fiction stories by Stanisław Lem focusing on the adventures of Trurl and Klapaucius, two best friends and rival intelligent robot “constructors”.

by Primo Levi (1971)

Narrative is contained within another narrative in this novel, as Faussone, an exuberant rigger, tells his stories of working to a chemist-writer narrator (no doubt Levi’s alter ego):his constructions, an adventurous monkey, a machine that caught stardust, a name gone wrong, overcoming the fear of water, from India, Russia to Alaska.

by Primo Levi (1975)

Levi is a superb storyteller, with an ability (and delight, admitting himself as belonging to “that species of persons who do things in order to talk about them”) to turn words into engaging stories. The Periodic Table consists of twenty one short stories named after elements, arranged chronologically based on events in Levi’s life, with two short fictions, Lead and Mercury, inserted at the point they were written.