books@cc.

by Danilo Kiš (1965)

An intensely detailed semi-autobiographical story about a child living in Hungary during the World War II.

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.

by Danilo Kiš (1976)

Seven different yet casually interlinked short stories about revolutionaries, mostly centering around the Russian Revolution

by Danilo Kiš (1972)

An old railway clerk, preoccupied with his quotidian concerns, attempted to find out why his pension was being reduced as the extermination of the Jews were taking place.

by Georges Perec (1969)

Born out of self-imposed formalist grid of lipogram, a parody thriller loaded with plots and subplots, pursuits, vengeance and trails, engrossing and well-written despite the missing ‘e’ letter throughout the whole novel.

by Georges Perec (1975)

A book of two alternating texts, one an imaginary adventure story, the other consisting of autobiographic fragments of wartime childhood.

by Georges Perec (1978)

A quilt of stories of inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block, frozen in time. The layered stories are interwoven with hundreds of lives, minutiae of details, literary and historical allusions, written with self-imposed constraints.

by Primo Levi

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.

A collection of insightful and understated autobiographical short stories named after elements by Primo Levi.

by Primo Levi (1971)

A collection of fifteen short stories, each centred on one character only. As overused it is for lame backcover reviews and acclaim, the phrase “superb storyteller” (and he, to some degrees, knows what a good story-telling is) is fully justified in the case of Levi: concise, analytical (but never dry) descriptions of details told in almost a sense of wonder, an appreciation, but never paraded in flamboyance.