The Night Circus and Other Stories

Blending the naturalistic and the fabulistic, these elusive, delicate stories fold fable and fairy tale into the everyday, domestic settings of kitchen, garden, car. Women love, and lose, strange creatures they find by the garden gate; dream dogs are liberated from the icy prison of a fridge; bathrooms bloom into rainforests that souls can lose themselves in forever. Seemingly quotidian routines and unremarkable lives are pierced by Kovalyk’s precise, sensual prose, to reveal the magic lurking just beneath the surface of the daily skin of existence.

Uršula Kovalyk is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and social worker. She was born in 1969 in Košice, eastern Slovakia and currently lives in the capital, Bratislava. She has published the short story collections , Neverné ženy neznášajú vajícka (Unfaithful Women Lay No Eggs, 2002) and Travesty šou (Travesty Show, 2004), and two novels, Žena zo sekáca (The Second-hand Woman 2008) and Krasojazdkyna (The Equestrienne, originally published in Slovak in 2013 and in English by Parthian in 2016) was shortlisted for Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft Litera Award, and received the Bibliotéka Prize for 2013. Her most recent collection of short stories, Cisté zviera (A Pure Animal), appeared in 2018. Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and worked for Amnesty International in London for over twenty years. Peter Sherwood taught Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They are based in London and work as freelance translators from and into English, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. Their book-length translations include Peter Krištúfek’s House of the Deaf Man (2014) and Uršula Kovalyk’s The Equestrienne (2016) for Parthian, as well as works by Balla, Béla Hamvas, Hamid Ismailov, Daniela Kapitánová, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, Petra Procházková, Noémi Szécsi, Antal Szerb, Miklós Vámos, and Pavel Vilikovský.