by Maxym Dupeshko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

I don’t know what lures me here. I come to this mountain a few times a year as to a place of spiritual pilgrimage, foraging here for air suffused with oxygen atoms and the scent of conifers. Though that’s most likely only part of it. It’s not just the taste of the air, not just the sweet headiness of the beech and fir trees, not just the pleasant height with its distant Bukovynian skyline, but also… But also something impalpable that unfurls through this space and pulsates all around. 

by Yuri Andrukhovych
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vitaly Chernetsky

In all the years given to him Mario Pongratz committed only one murder. He would only have to face the responsibility for it at the heavenly court, and the details of that closed trial remain unknown—for understandable reasons. As for the earthly court, it was very open indeed and sentenced Mario Pongratz under a completely different article. However, this is not at all the beginning, but rather one of the endings of this story, and it looms somewhere far ahead, sometime in the 1890s.

By Artem Chapeye
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

He even felt jealous of that old lady. The crowd splashed out of the metro into the Akademmistechko Station. People flooded the stairs from wall to wall. And that old woman was walking in the opposite direction with a vengeful look and squabbling loudly. “This is a mob! People can’t even get through!” She genuinely viewed herself as separate, as different. As if she wasn’t a part of the mob. He felt jealous of that lady because it just didn’t work for him like that anymore. 

by Lyubko Deresh
Translated from the Ukrainian by Patrick John Corness

So, von Liebig was a courteous person. In his lectures, however contentious the issue under debate might be, he always acted with decorum when speaking of his critics, noting their strengths and praising their achievements. This completely won over Stefan Lange, who was at the time a third year student in the languages department of the University of Vienna.

by Victoria Amelina
Translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins

After Tarik was gone, and the Egyptian government had yielded its positions, I closed my laptop and walked up to the window. It was spring, and it wasn’t yellow leaves, as on that distant day in the fall of 1989, but now the white petals of an old pear tree that swirled in the yard between the hanging linens and the maples, abloom with the green heartlings of newborn life.

by Lucie Faulerová
Translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker

It was the worst moment of her life—except for all the others, that is. It was the worst moment of my life—except for all the others, that is. Except for the ones behind me now, waving to me with that look of satisfaction from a job well done, and except for the ones looking forward to me, shuffling their feet in anticipation, watching out for my arrival, chins lifted and arms spread wide.

by Marek Šindelka
Translated from the Czech by Nathan Fields

The grain is smooth and shines like a pearl. Hardly half a millimeter in length. Its origin is unclear. Maybe the remains of undersea mountains on the bottom of the ancient ocean, maybe a tiny particle of Saharan sand transported by subtropical wind from continent to continent. Maybe (and this is most probable) it is just ordinary debris without meaning or past. The grain, along with a number of others, is stuck onto a tiny piece of apple pulp full of putrid bacteria. The pulp glistens and ferments.

by Jana Šrámková
Translated from the Czech by Andrea Goldbergerová

And then there was an awful humming sound, and it already fell down, flying crossways, it just cut out a portion of our house from the side like this. Wouldn’t you go hide in the cellar? We would, we had been there three times at night, but there was no time, I don’t know why they did not sound the alarm, nobody was expecting it.