Contemporary literature

As every year, the Swedish Academy pronounced its much-awaited verdict: eagerly anticipated by bookworms across the globe. This time, the jury awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Han Kang, shining a spotlight on a writer not necessarily familiar to the broader public. Like many readers, I rushed to the bookshops, browsed through the available titles by this newly crowned laureate, and faced a major dilemma: which of Kang’s novels should I read first? Unable to decide, I bought three of h...

Published in 1994, Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novel set in East Africa around the end of the 19th century, when European colonial powers were beginning to divide and claim the continent for themselves. The story follows Yusuf, a twelve-year-old boy whose father hands him over to a wealthy merchant named Aziz to pay off a debt. At first, Yusuf works in Aziz’s shop and gardens, but soon he joins the merchant on long trading journeys deep into the African interior. Along the way, Yusuf s...

A sharp observer of Polish reality and a virtuoso of language, Dorota Masłowska returns with her long-awaited novel, Magical Wound. This latest work is, in fact, a collection of loosely connected short stories. These dozen-page narratives resemble the rapid-fire nature of TikTok videos—entertaining, moving, and intriguing modern readers whose attention span is increasingly fleeting. Each story immerses the reader in a different piece of this fragmented mosaic, depicting characters struggling ...