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 Buzarovska'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.

In the second volume of Eimar O'Duffy's Cuanduine trilogy (the first, King Goshawk and the Birds, was reissued by Dalkey Archive in 2017), we meet the "man on the street," Aloysius O'Kennedy, an erstwhile grocer's assistant who has been transported against his will to the city of Bulnid on the planet Rathe-a kind of egalitarian paradise of which O'Kennedy wants no part. His Gulliver-like adventures among these otherworldly idealists (all recounted in great detail to his former employer the grocer, in an effort to explain his long absence from work) are the subject of this sui generis novel, which demonstrates again that Eimar O'Duffy is an Irish writer like no other.