Chocolate by Michal Olszewski [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]

The second installment in The Guardian‘s series of short stories from Eastern Europe is ‘Chocolate’ by Michal Olszewski.

Olszewski is a young (b. 1977) Polish writer who works in Krakow for the daily paper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The story—which is wonderfully translated by recent “Found in Translation” award winner Antonia Lloyd-Jones—is about a young man shoplifting in a German supermarket. More contained and stylistically straight that the Clemens Meyer story from yesterday, this story also has a bit of a twist at the end. . .

There are a number of nice things about this Guardian series, but on a very basic level, it’s cool to see a daily newspaper publishing international fiction. I wonder when that last happened in the States . . .