On the Threshold

On the Threshold gathers seventeen stories by Dušan Mitana, a Slovak writer who is something of a cult figure in contemporary Central European literature. The stories appear in English for the first time, and they set the everyday beside the mystical.

In one, an unhappily married woman becomes pregnant by her elderly neighbour, who lives in the building across the street and has never touched her. His attention creates life inside her, while his own life rises and fades with her gaze. In another, a man is trapped in a pub on a sweltering afternoon after refusing to buy a beer along with his cigarettes. A vigilant bartender and a crowd of beer-obsessed regulars block every attempt he makes to leave, until the beer, which sustains them all, runs out.

Mitana's fiction makes the rational and the irrational hard to tell apart. He takes plain, ordinary realism and bends it with mystical and supernatural distortions, adding a Hitchcockian paranoia and plenty of unexpected turns. The collection is an introduction to his absurdist style for readers of English.