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The Gypsy Princess and the Nightingale The truth is that, in the days of yore, the Gypsies had a country. Now they keep searching for it in vain, the wheels of their wagons wearing ruts in the roads as they travel them back and forth, looking for a hidden spot of earth somewhere under an out-of-the-way patch of sky. Only in their souls does the hope still exist that one day they will find their country. Then they will gather together from the farthest corners of the world where they...

Of course I remember him. Monsieur Ndétare, my former teacher, who was already getting old at the time. With a hatchet face, hands like pitchforks, and legs like stilts to bear him on his mission of public schoolteacher to the remotest corners of the land, places where the state is happy to be cast in a secondary role. Ndétare stood out from the other inhabitants of the island because of his silhouette, his manners, his citified look, his European attire, his academic French,...

I still remember him like it was yesterday: a small man, elegant in his own special way, entirely different from traditional men's elegance, such as is found in a suit and tie. He used to buy his clothes from secondhand shops—lenga, as we used to call them; he would choose them with care and a taste for beauty. In winter he would wrap a long red scarf around his neck, then, on days when the cold was harshest (in January for instance), he would wear a black leather jacket. I can...

Today, in the year 1170 of the Hegira, as I finish the narration of my journey to Mount Meru, I can't help thinking about Omui. He was the best storyteller in all Mombasa. The fabulous stories he would tell every Friday in the square in front of the grand mosque always enchanted me. I keep the memory of that man alive within me. I like to think that I'm made of the same stuff and that like him, I too belong to the race of enchanters. Of course, I'm guilty of pride to think...

1 "What are you doing over there?" asked the dog. "Collecting feathers," said Lotta. She turned around. "And what are you doing?" The dog squinted in the sun. It was early in the morning. The sun's rays were slanted and did not give off much warmth. The dog was small and black and thin and very dirty. "I asked you what you were doing," said Lotta. The dog sat down in the grass and began to lick his front right paw. He wrinkled up his nose and cleaned especially carefully...

I I have decided to kill Germaine on December 29. I have been thinking about this for weeks—whatever one may say about it, killing someone requires both psychological and logistical preparation. I believe I have now reached the necessary state of mind, even if I have yet to choose the means with which I will do the deed. It is now a question of detail. I'd rather give myself a bit of latitude on this practical point, and in so doing add a measure of improvisation to my...

Magda comes in, but without Eric. She looks like something's happened, like she's been shattered into little pieces, her hair this way, her handbag that way, her dress to the left, her earrings to the right. Her panty hose all muddy on the left. Her face on the right, black tears flowing from her eyes. Like she'd been fighting in the Polish-Russki war, like the whole Polish-Russki army had trampled her, running through the park. All my feelings come back to life within me. The...

Dorota Masłowska is coping with literary fame in an especially literary country. Her first novel, Snow White and Russian Red, was published in 2002 to immediate critical praise and commercial success. Among its many important distinctions, the novel was named a finalist for the 2003 Nike Prize, Poland's top literary honor, alongside recent books by Nobel laureates Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska. And as one might expect in a media-driven culture, Masłowska was hounded by...

1 So slender and so graceful not much more than thirteen the tip of a cardamom branch in spring just about to bud ten miles down the Yangzhou road and the spring winds were blowing lots of women since, bead curtains lifting, but never like that again. 2 Too much love somehow became no love at all over this farewell bottle we can't manage even a friendly smile only the candle seems to be able to generate some feeling all night it...

The two friends' meetings resembled a ritual that went back to the years of holy struggle when they would drink more cups of coffee than they could count to give them energy, a small vice Laid Touhami had picked up in the mountains and the mayor at a young age, since his father considered coffee an aphrodisiac and permanently wore a necklace of coffee beans round his neck. In fact, coffee had been behind Zineddine Ayachi's flight into the Ouarsenis and his joining the ranks of...

The two men were alone now. Or was it two women? The night stretched on endlessly. So did the mountain. And the frosted sky lying lightly over the mountain began to pale. The mountain stood facing them, bristling with rocky spurs, with clusters of thorn bushes: snow-dusted specters, already white-congealed. The men (the women?) were two lone figures. The silhouettes that had been climbing for quite some time now might well have been taken for two phantoms. Just the two men, alone, cut...

I am a dog. Who else but me can acknowledge it with such humility? Because I don't blame myself for anything, "dog" becomes no more than a word, a name: it's the name men have given me. But there you have it: I eventually accommodated myself to it. I eventually came to recognize myself in the destiny in which it decked me out. From then on, "dog" became part of my universe, because I made men's words mine. I digested the construction of their sentences and the intonations of...

Q. Here we are in Sarri , Barcelona, your birthplace and the scenario for your previous two novels. How come you decided to set your most recent novel, Queen Cocaine, in Colombia, between Bogotá and the jungle of El Chocó? A. I don't search out my novels in a mechanical way from my life, but they follow or spring out of my biography in some way. I was born a writer in Latin America, as a daughter of the boom in Latin American literature. As a Catalan who writes in...

These are among the words discussed by Christopher Moore in In Other Words: Arabic taarradhin Many commentators have pointed out that Arabic has no word for "compromise," in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. As we know, compromise can often leave all sides discontented. But a much happier concept, taarradhin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, as in "I win. You win." It's a way of finding the resolution of a problem without...

Once upon a time, a long time ago-a very, very long time ago-in a corner of the world that was neither faraway nor near, there lived a girl whose name was Moon-Fairy. Moon-Fairy was kindhearted and helpful to everyone, but she carried a huge burden of sadness. She had no family or friends in the whole wide world. She was very lonely. She had been living with Bibi Khanom for as long as she could remember. Bibi Khanom had a daughter by the name of Golabetun, who was pretty but not kind. She...

Dina and Shlomo went out shopping. Their son, Dudi, stayed home. He didn't stay alone. Tally, his baby sister, stayed with him. His dog Rexie stayed with him too. Before Dudi's mother and father left, they stopped at the door for a moment, and his mother said: "If Tally cries, give her a pacifier." And his father said: "If the phone rings, just say we'll be back soon." "Okay," Dudi said, and they left. Dudi was sitting on the floor, playing with his fire engine....

The affable young clerk laid out the photographs on the glass case backlit by a small fluorescent bulb. Their reddish tint, a bit like the color of the lilies that grew everywhere in the summer, suggested discoloration. Though taken with color film, the pictures were monochromatic, as if they were black and white photographs processed with red toner. "The film's destroyed. It's been too long since you took these pictures. You didn't store it properly, either. You really...

Journalists who visit Iraq hear many stories, yet they are prevented from recording the majority of them because they must chase after the hot story, the quick journalistic news piece. A journalist might sit down in her hotel room to record the things she has observed, but in the frenzy of filing her report, not only will she forget these stories, but they will appear to her afterward as something faded, having lost its luster. It might even-and this is quite conceivable-appear to her...

Once upon a time an angel lost a feather. It hardly ever happens, only once every two or three hundred years, but it does happen. The angel was flying over a solitary lake, through the bluest waters of the sky; forests and blossoming meadows stretched as far as his eye could reach. He was enchanted to see such radiant beauty and descended to skim the water. It was then that he lost the feather. The water shivered as he passed, and when the angel rose towards the sky, the feather remained,...

1 He later recalled that it had been a strange, sleepless night. Sanogawa Shinsha had fallen asleep in bed with a script propped on his chest when word arrived that his younger brother, Tojaku, had just died in a car accident. Shinsha and his wife, Chisa, slept side by side on low matching beds placed in a bedroom decorated in a mixture of Japanese and foreign styles. Because Shinsha had a habit of reading scripts, memorizing parts, and planning roles late into the night, an antique...

This story is set in the time when monsters were still living up there in the mountains and down here in the forests. Granny Long Tongue and Red Ban the Ogre lived high up on Mt. Okuyama, at Okumata Pass. The woman's tongue was longer than a snakevine, stronger than a stable boy's whip. Red Ban's face was broader than a cottage window, and when he bared his tusks and moved his face up close to yours, he was so scary that even the mountain bears rolled their eyes in fright....

We live in the big house, all of us-men and women, boys and girls, and my mother and me. My mother captures all my attention. And she's ruled my heart too. I watch my mother no matter where she is: for she's the one who brings the hammer and pounds the nail into the wall so she can hang up a picture of my father. And she's the one who sends me off to buy half a kilo of cement and half a kilo of gypsum. Then she makes a paste. She closes up all the holes in the house and...

Everybody was gone, and Viktoria was home all alone. "When everybody's gone, my house is a magic place." She went to her parents' bedroom and pulled back the bedspread. A big bear lay in the middle of the bed. He looked right at her. "Aha!" Viktoria said. "Give me something," she said. The bear walked out of the room and brought her dad's hat to her. Viktoria put it on. Then she covered up the bear again. She opened her mom's nightstand. And there sat a big...

It was simple it was evening it was October, Beretta, mon amour. You didn't even realize how I transmute from a mole, hounded through galleries of all sorts (oh, where did the euglena viridis about which I dreamed so much run to!) an astrology full of marrow and without regrets. It was evening. I was diaphanous. Chemical. Fire grass. Retching. While steaming amid the zodiac it was so much October and so much evening, Beretta, mon amour . . . It was.

It is bitter, each Passover, to read, in the luxury and voluptuousness of being The solitude of the four boards from the palm slapped over the cheek the morning tear urged against the abandonment of oneself and the shoe of the clown inside your brain -this is how he began each of his holidays, my friend, Mynheer. They say that in olden days bitter herbs saved him while his own skin was his tent and the vinegar from the clay burned the entrails severed from the psalms....