The stories that Paul Filev has collected in this anthology of recent Macedonian fiction introduce English-language readers to a literature that has long been overlooked. Ranging from melancholy realism, such as Rumena Bužarovska’s “Lily,” to surreal fantasias, such as Tomislav Osmanli’s “Strained,” in which a stressed-out businessman eats his own computer, these texts provide a portrait of a country in constant transformation, still haunted by the Soviet past but quickly hurtling into the technocratic future. Comic and tragic, po-faced and hysterical, Contemporary Macedonian Fiction allows us to discover some of the most exciting young writers at work today.
