The stories brought together in Foreigners, Drunks and Babies cast the slanting light of a poet's sensibility on the Imperial Academy of an ancient Eastern empire; detail the musical education of a northern realist parish priest and his sons; travel through the West of Ireland with a couple facing various extinctions; spy on the shadowy private life of a Cold War warrior; engage in hand-to-hand fighting with a classroom full of Soviet teachers; follow the adventures of an Italian girl visiting her sick boyfriend in hospital; discover how hard it can be to get a passport for your first-born; find out why everyone pretends you're not there; investigate a seemingly victimless crime; reveal reasons for a Japanese girl's committing suicide; and realize that there's no need to be forgiven for things you didn't know you hadn't done.
Stories from the city,the sea, the forest;stories from placeswhere everything is notalways as it first appears From a rain-soaked Berlin to a neon-lit Tokyo, the midwest of North America to the Parisian backstreets, a suburban London kitchen to a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, wherever these characters are travelling from or to, they are all navigating unfamiliar ground in search of answers.
Told through a number of profound voices, this intriguing collection of six short stories recounts events from the lives of four generations of a Greek family who experience poverty, violence, war, and tragedy from pre-World War II until the present.
When Elderly Miss Allie sees her new great-grandbaby for the first time, she discovers a shocking truth about her own past, a truth that causes Miss Allie to sneak away into the woods with the baby -- who, in Miss Allie's memory-addled mind, is only a heavy doll, one she can carry no longer.
From blind dates to back seats to a drinking game gone wrong, the short stories in Divining Venus are linked by a series of compelling characters all trying to discern something truthful about that thing called love.
Srdan Srdic's collection of short stories, Combustions, establishes this author's position as one of the best prose writers in Serbia and across the region.