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Short Stories

trans­lated into
  • Vaders die rouwen
    Vaders die rouwen
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    Fathers Who Mourn
    An impressive story collection, in which Carmien Michels proves herself an extremely intelligent and sensitive storyteller.
    Het Parool

    In her debut story collection, Carmien Michels exposes the fragility of fatherhood. Her six short stories are really mini novels, in which her characters face illness, memories of a difficult childhood, stalking, rape and death. All fathers have a hard time, but some rather more than others. They fall short of expectations, miss their children, or struggle to emulate their own fathers. Michels’ characters echo the universe of Roald Dahl.  

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  • Cover - Crackling Skulls
    Cover - Crackling Skulls
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    Crackling Skulls
    Penetrating and splendid, full of brilliant, somewhat harrowing images
    NRC Handelsblad

    A maverick of Flemish literature, Roger Van de Velde has had a lasting impact on the current generation of Flemish authors. The novel 'Crackling skulls' reflects his unique life. In twenty powerful short stories, Van de Velde portrays his ‘companions in misery’, people living on the fringes of society, with whom he found himself in psychiatric institutions. Empathy, combined with a powerful talent for observation, an eye for detail and literary flair, produces compelling portraits of lost souls.

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  • Cover of Beter Late Than Never
    Cover of Beter Late Than Never
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    Better Never Than Late
    Radiant fiction. This essential book shines a light on personal experiences of migration in ways that illuminate and surprise.
    Bernardine Evaristo

    In this intriguing mosaic of ten stories Unigwe chronicles the unusual lives of a group of Nigerian immigrants who are making their way in Belgium. They all left their country in the hope of a better life, but the pain of missing Nigeria is a heavy price to pay. Readers will be moved by the realistic, recognisable characters and Unigwe’s empathetic analysis of a migrant community, the situation they fled and the disappointments in their new country.

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    Trains and Rooms
    At times poignant, at times shocking, but just as often witty enough to make you burst out laughing.
    Cutting Edge

    Annelies Verbeke interweaves more than four thousand years’ worth of literature from around the world. Inspired by better and lesser known classics from before 1900, the fifteen pieces in this collection form a kaleidoscope full of interrelated moments. ‘Trains and Rooms’ is like a hall of mirrors in which new doors keep opening up into other eras and narratives. It reinforces her reputation as the ‘Queen of the Flemish short story’.

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  • Cover 'We, the Foam'
    Cover 'We, the Foam'
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    We, the Foam
    As if Mark Oliver Everett of Eels tried his hand at writing fiction.
    Cutting Edge

    In eleven short stories, Van Thuyne introduces the reader to her highly authentic and eccentric universe. She creates a universe peopled by characters who are slowly losing their grip on reality. Her vivid and filmic stories are exercises in controlled madness. ‘We, the Foam’ is highly unconventional and truly remarkable.

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  • Cover Misery Loves Company. A Life In Stories
    Cover Misery Loves Company. A Life In Stories
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    Misery Loves Company. A Life In Stories
    Incredible to see how much beauty someone can produce in half a century
    De Telegraaf

    Hugo Claus is the internationally acclaimed author of dozens of plays, novels and collections of poetry. But over the course of 50 years he also wrote many short stories. A half-century filled with grotesque nightmares and charming scenes of love and loss, with mysterious and comical characters populating Claus’ characteristic bitter-sweet world.

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  • Cover Hallelujah
    Cover Hallelujah
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    Hallelujah
    Bizarre, mysterious, incredibly powerful
    Trouw

    ‘Hallelujah’ is a feverish, yet also humorous collection about inevitable loss and the temptation of the clean slate.

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    Even Birds Fall
    Daem's stories exude daring and the urge to experiment. ****
    Cutting Edge

    This book is Daem’s disconcerting, funny and idiosyncratic debut. Despite the often dark subjects – he does not fight shy of death – Daem invariably allows a gleam of hope to show through in his stories. He carries the reader along with his excellent sense of control and structure, working out the dramatic storyline to the last detail.

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  • Cover The City and Time
    Cover The City and Time
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    The City and Time
    Robijn fits his touching miniatures into a larger, meaningful story without his characters becoming puppets.
    De Standaard

    'The City and Time' consists of nine stories in chronological order, all of which take place in Brussels. Robijn’s characters all have difficulty getting by in life, but succeed by throwing themselves blindly into their regular activities. Until something – often love – turns up and turns everything upside down.

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  • Cover - Assumptions
    Cover - Assumptions
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    Assumptions
    A masterly collection of stories, highly intelligent and hugely comical *****
    De Standaard

    This ‘novel-in-stories’ displays how people often believe they know more than they actually do. They apply labels or draw premature conclusions and, by doing so, cause others to suffer. In this collection of fifteen stories, Verbeke plays a beautiful game with fiction and reality, with believing and exposing. The characters’ assumptions are depicted so realistically and convincingly that readers find themselves going along with them too.

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  • Cover Barely Body
    Cover Barely Body
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    Barely Body
    Flawless stories like these haven’t appeared in Flanders for a long time.
    Knack

    ‘Barely Body’ is a collection of five classic existentialist tales about people who are alive only in the physical sense. Their dreams are mercilessly eroded by the ravages of time, turning them into pale shadows of who they used to be.

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  • Cover A Child of God
    Cover A Child of God
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    A Child of God
    Intelligent irony lends these serious stories a wonderfully light tone.
    Het Parool

    Rachida Lamrabet tells moving stories about ordinary people. Not only does she have a story to tell, but she does so beautifully and incisively.

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  • Cover Greener Grass
    Cover Greener Grass
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    Greener Grass
    Beautifully articulated and full of unexpected twists and turns
    De Telegraaf

    ‘Greener Grass’ is a collection of stories in which a succession of people step into the limelight, all of whose lives contain substantial hidden realms. With their emotional isolation and longing for affection, the characters arouse sympathy and compassion, even if their self-control ends in a violent outburst.

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  • Cover The Bee Eaters
    Cover The Bee Eaters
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    The Bee Eaters
    With this extraordinarily successful book, Terrin confirms what gradually should become official: he and no one else is the most intriguing author of his generation.
    De Tijd

    ‘The Bee Eaters’ combines a refined style with a great deal of depth of content, eeriness with the identifiable, the everyday with what is concealed behind the facade. Terrin is not only inspired by the work of Camus but also by, for example, Franz Kafka and Willem Frederik Hermans.

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    Tuesday Land. Sketches of Belgium
    16 incisive observations by a stylistically strong writer who holds his readers’ attention with a great sense of timing and narrative skill
    De Tijd

    A declaration of love to the Belgian in the street, wonder at his pastimes, an ode to his beautiful, but archaic turns of phrase. And also: a deliberately fragmented narrative about a Belgian childhood, a chronicling of the things that pass. All this Verhulst describes, ponders and pokes fun at in his unique and inimitable style: fluent and smooth, incisive and ironic, as well as over-the-top and hilarious, but never without compassion.

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  • Cover Toast
    Cover Toast
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    Toast (Tox/Soap/Web)
    Hard, pleasantly crude and more topical than ever. His stories are on fast forward without the brakes on.
    De Standaard over 'Web'

    Mennes depicts young characters who resort to extreme measures in an attempt to deal with the emptiness of their lives. ‘Toast’ offers a heart-wrenching and impressive portrait of a Lost Generation.

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  • Cover 'Christmas and Other Love Stories'
    Cover 'Christmas and Other Love Stories'
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    Christmas and Other Love Stories
    Excellent book
    NBD Biblion

    Love and what follows is the theme of this collection of ten stories: about the catastrophe ánd the tenderness of sex, about habit, love-hate, memory, selfpity, rollicking revenge.

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  • Cover Café De Raaf Is Still Closed
    Cover Café De Raaf Is Still Closed
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    Café De Raaf Is Still Closed
    Complete hopelessness without slipping into pathos or protective irony
    Ons Erfdeel

    In this collection of stories Berckmans shows the most unsavoury and corrupt side of reality. The unstable characters bear their existential emptiness without illusions, self-deceiving optimism is alien to them. Every sentence of Berckmans is filled with the buzz of rock ‘n roll. 

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  • Cover A Butcher's Son with Glasses
    Cover A Butcher's Son with Glasses
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    A Butcher's Son with Glasses
    Ingeniously constructed and imaginative tales arouse emotion and a sense of tragedy.
    Het Parool

    The four stories in this debut provide a caricatured but equally nostalgic and loving impression of ‘La Flandre Profonde’ and demonstrate Lanoye’s feel for humour and style. Although the main character from ‘A Butcher’s Son with Glasses’ resembles the author in many ways, these stories are nevertheless loaded with surrealism, wit and crackling irony.

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  • Cover Pitfalls
    Cover Pitfalls
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    Pitfalls
    A literary all-rounder who explores all facets of life
    De Volkskrant

    ‘Pitfalls’ is a varied collection of letters, verse and short stories. The excerpts from the letters – which were never intended to be made public – caused a furore at the time. The title refers to the obstacles between Minne and the process of writing, between the author and publication – in other words, to the aforementioned struggle. As Minne put it: ‘Caution, enter at your peril!’

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  • Cover Grotesques
    Cover Grotesques
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    Grotesques
    Very well worth discovering
    Staalkaart

    ‘Novellas that attempt to make a fool of people,’ is how Paul van Ostaijen once described his grotesques. In these astonishing texts full of absurd blow-ups, he lashed out against the wrongs of his time, mercilessly unsettling all logic.

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