On My Aunt’s Shallow Grave White Roses Have Already Bloomed is a blend of the understated sinister of Shirley Jackson and the dark flamboyance of Angela Carter, making it an excellent choice to curl up with for the upcoming Halloween and winter nights.
Greece is a country steeped in the tradition of fantastical, mythical creatures, or where the gods hold sway over the fates of mortals. In My Aunt’s Shallow Grave, Maria Mitsora has taken this concept and played ruthlessly with it. Reality often slips into the bizarre, or the barrier between the two begins to break down until there is a melding of normal life and fantasy, creating a world where the reader is held suspended in time as they immerse themselves in the story.
This collection focuses on relationships, albeit often unhealthy ones of obsession (a theme which runs through Greek mythology), as well as extremes of behaviour from people whose perception of the world is clearly at odds with everyone else’s. The voices Mitsora chooses therefore create a terrific growing sense of unease for a reader who is lead through a narrative where they are really not sure how the story will end. The endings are generally the kind which do not provide the comfort of resolution, or making things right in the world. In other words, these are stories which will continue to haunt you long after you have finished them and have you looking over your shoulder for that out of place shadow, or something which may or may not be there.
Jacob Moe’s translation does well in picking up the nuances of Mitsora’s writing which is very fluid and reminiscent of prose poetry when moving the reader deftly through a scene or a character’s emotions. On My Aunt’s Shallow Grave is therefore a book which will continue to deliver on every re-read.
This is an excellent book for any writer who enjoys working with off kilter stories which embrace fantasy, elements of subtle horror and character inner dialogue with skewed psychological perspectives. It is a difficult field to work in and get right, which Mitsora does brilliantly.

'At times I wish I could get to the beginning of my story. But the begining is lost in darkness even more than the end.'

Maria Mitsora’s writing is beautiful, translated from Greek to English by Jacob Moe. I always wonder about translations, how much of the author’s work can suffer or shine is dependant on the translator. It is an interesting collection, strange at times, heartbreaking, stories blooming where they please. Some of the stories are broody, which is exactly why I enjoyed them so much, full of dreams which are as disjointed as our troubling thoughts. In Versions of Persephone, the character Axan ‘is on time for her rendezvous with the explosion.’Aren’t we all, of course in her case it is a physical explosion, she is in the underworld, trapped by pain. Her father, king of it all, the criminal warlord.

In Brown Dog in November, Nino needs to refrain from barking, as he mourns the loss of his Eleni. Eleni, the one woman who transfixed him, the one whose traces he still hunts for. What violence haunts him, as divorce from his love eviscerates him still? Who is the young fresh girl, another Eleni? It’s disturbing, the way he loves, if he loves at all. Eleni who wanted him to ‘walk in the sun’, Eleni who could calm the wild dogs. She, who turned her back on him.

Memories flash and dim, time rushes and stops. How much do we know of the storm inside our loved ones? In Stormy Verbs (my favorite), Verbia wants her beloved to feel the force of a river but it is the painful memories of the place that make that force dangerous, an abyss of pain. It is this place that created in Verbia what he fells for, her ‘fragile but unbreakable balance.’ A gut-wrenching story of regret and shame, short yet powerful.

Sipping the ‘distant froth’ of childhood and memory, the stories in this collection can be biting and bitter, lost characters looking for escape or return to themselves and each other. Stories we all read differently, feel uniquely. Dreamy at times, people as distant as a fading thought, struggling against the mundane and soon we all reach The End of the Show much like the wasp, sprayed with poison to oblivion and yet with the capability to fly away in spite of it all, a surprise to whatever mean eye is watching, waiting for us to die. I got lost in the writing, a collection that engaged me.

Publication Date: September 18, 2018

Yale University Press

"And now as the story ends, my life must begin. I must build it from scratch though I'm unfamiliar with the materials. First I think of fasting to cleanse my body, and then of cleaning the small apartment, washing the windows though the view is cold and unremarkable."

An ode to the refracted everyday life, which is seen through a playful and sometimes melancholic mirror. A series of vignettes, interlocking stories, in which the protagonists find themselves tangled in the mantle of reality and myth, logic and dreams, with magical realism dominating the pages and language moving freely between bilingual and biblical. In this flow of consciousness short story collection, the subject possesses a dispersive identity, acts in a world that although named "Athens" is more and more likely to deny the narrowly grounded anchorages of the place. According to the translator of the issue

"Mitsora's world is such that it lets readers believe that a spiteful act of fiction might just be avenged in real life, and that the end is, well, never quite the end."

Indeed, the stories seemingly do not end, the adventures of the heroes seem to go on, along with the philosophical quests, the Baudelairian spleen and the obsession with fairy tales, which can only be interpreted as longing for an escape from reality. The inextricable relationship of the plot with tradition, and in particular with the ancient Greek myth, is both remarkable and prominent in the titles of the short stories; however, despite the mythological signals and ideological commands in human memory, the microcosm and not the mythological element is its raw material and ultimately give the atmosphere.