‘All Saints’ Mountain’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Most literary writers who tackle science-fiction stumble badly, either through ignorance (assuming their shopworn ideas are new and exciting) or condescension (also known as Atwood Syndrome). Tokarczuk, whose other work ranges pleasingly all over idea-space, is different. The core idea of this religiously themed science-fiction story has been considered before by writers as unalike as Peter Goldsworthy and Neil Cross, but Tokarczuk gives it her own unique, unsettling spin and does it with wonderful style.

First published in English in Hazlitt, 2019, and available to read here

‘The Ugliest Woman in the World’ by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

“Anyone who hasn’t got a mother hasn’t got a mother tongue either.” The itinerant circus impresario who narrates this misshapen love story comes across as something of a freak and a misfit himself. So when he recruits a grotesque-looking lady as a lucrative sideshow, the stage is set for a tragicomedy of mishandled passions and mistaken identities. Through her, he discovers “a secret – that everyone is in disguise”. Quieter, perhaps quirkier, than Angela Carter, though rich in comparable neo-Gothic tropes, Tokarczuk’s story investigates her abiding theme of our inherent strangeness – not only to foreign persons and other cultures, but to our very selves.

Published in Best European Fiction 2011, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, Dalkey Archive Press