Blue Has No South
Alex Epstein; translated by Becka Mara McKay

published 2010 • 5.5" x 7.75" • 131 pages
ISBN 9781566568067 • paperback • $15.00 •

"Epstein’s collection is something of a spatial triumph—microscopic stories (some are only single sentences long) with manifold compartments and a capaciousness belied by their slight appearance.
These stories range widely, drawing from mythology and history to the arts and the quotidian.  Epstein...remarked...that he delights in contrasts: contrasts between the real and unreal, between the ordinary and fantastical, earthly and celestial.  That much is on display in the eclecticism of this volume. 'Blue Has No South' is, at least in part, an exercise in putting poetic tools to work in prose.
Translating from the Hebrew, Becka Mara McKay has captured the essential poetic qualities of these stories, in particular their subtle but insistent evocations of hidden depths and expanding spaces...Within the bounds of these microscopic, paragraph-long vignettes are traces of other spaces, suggestions of a before and after and of unplumbed depths... mesmerizing"
—Words Without Borders

"Their love story ended many years ago. He still writes her name as a solution to crossword puzzle clues of suitable length."

Alex Epstein’s miniature stories are indeed love stories, puzzles, stray clues to puzzles he never finishes, the beginnings or ends of philosophical treatises, parables, jokes, modernized legends, or perhaps a vivid handful of images thrown together, then allowed to disperse. This is a form of which he has been hailed as a master, a form as singular and intricate as a collection of fingerprints. His stories are populated by angels, chess players, mythical figures, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, lovers young and old, writers of disappearing languages; they are set in airports, trains, the sites of legends, hotels, bookstores in countries that no longer exist, dreams. In each of them, Epstein draws precisely the smallest possible world, and revels in the great possibilities of a single sentence. In each of them, we are invited to celebrate everything that can happen before “the tip of the pencil breaks against the bright paper.”

Alex Epstein is the author of three short-story collections and three novels; in 2003 he received Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. He teaches in Tel Aviv. Becka Mara McKay is a poet and translator, most recently of Suzane Adam’s Laundry.

Clockroot Books

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