The White Review Short Story Prize, sponsored by RCW, is an annual short story competition for emerging writers. The prize awards £2,500 to the best piece of short fiction...
Sanja Grozdanić is a writer and the publisher of KRASS Press. She has written about art, film, and literature for SSENSE, TANK magazine, 032c and the Griffith Review, among others.
Articles Available Online
This is not a story, this is a sequence The sequence describes human indignity, indifference, callousness… weary subjects, to be sure, and I feel weariness The sequence is about the distance between good and evil, which is a short distance, but steep Not in the way you might hope, either; to do evil is simpler than ever It is a downhill motion This concept has long been theorised, but this is not about theory
This is about feeling
When E was asked to describe her first five years ‘as a refugee’ in Sweden, she responded with weariness She told her interrogator that her experience taught her, like nothing before had taught her, the laws of gravity It was the first time she understood that the world was not flat She saw the earth clearly as a sphere, where the abyss above was the same as the abyss below Some bend some break at the sight of this, but none forget it No surprise that, in the stillness, her body ached as her mind did The mind and the body exist, not in opposition, but in parallel
I am not E, the husband I loved did not become a soldier, a soldier who by definition could only be my enemy That is not my story But I know the distance between a man and a soldier, and it is a short one I have seen the distance on trains, I have seen the distance in night clubs I woke up to the distance this morning I woke up to the sound of screaming I do not mean this is a metaphor: this morning I woke up to the noise of a woman screaming
Maybe there is no world without cruelty, maybe there is no world without power Our bias towards a cure leaves out this kind of data
Fireflies existed for the generation before mine but they are long gone now Like language All corrupted
At this point the narrator begins to speak in tongues The subtitles read: Mania & Mimesis
1
I watched a young man be hypnotised, as a performance The instructions were in
who bravely blasts their breath through the horn flares of gloomy streets, into dripping construction trailers, dropped by the dead, the dull anxiety of...