Five volumes of poetry later, my first prose book, titled Lav Prtsa (Goode Release), has finally seen the light of day.
I’ve subtitled it “Short Stories” (Karchapatumner) simply because I couldn’t find any other way to define a genre that floats at the crossroads of the short story, flash fiction, the essay, stand-up comedy, and the living humor of friendly banter.
To be honest, I’ve written many fictional stories before, but they never quite felt right enough to turn into a book. Instead, I realized this self-made genre of short yet complete narratives—written in the spirit of a documentary memoir—with pure writerly pleasure.
Let me say from the outset: this is not the aesthetic-conceptual literature of someone aspiring to create “high art.” Rather, it is an attempt to reproduce the ancient human pleasure of telling someone something incredible on behalf of reality—and entertaining them through that telling. The act of storytelling, of making things interesting through exaggeration, of making them flourish through fascination, serves as an archaic ritual of cheerful intimacy in a time when everyone is no longer telling a story, but selling one—mostly the story of their own success.
I didn’t overthink it. I locked the snob-mystic, who knows how to unravel words and their subtle threads, in the basement. Instead, I trained from scratch the one within me who sees and retells the hilarious “conspiracies” of life amidst the falsity of the days—narrating in the first person. Life is a complex, illogical, yet funny adventure from which, in the end, one can have a “lucky escape.”
