Black Woods
Short story collection by tony lashden
Short story collection by tony lashden
ORIGINAL TITLE: чорны лес
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Papier Mâché, 2023
94 PAGES
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SAMPLES AVAILABLE
ENGLISH AND FRENCH SAMPLES AVAILABLE
“I often imagined myself back there on the frontier, though I couldn’t describe what exactly that meant to me. I remembered the smells, the sounds, the voices of people in our village. There’s our frontier shimmering in the sunlight, glittering like the wings of a dragonfly. There’s someone calling to the geese by the pond: the sound bouncing loudly off the surface of the water into the air. There’s Ma standing on the veranda, steadfast, unintimidated. There’s me running through the meadow, swept along in its gentle, aromatic waves.”
A collection of haunting short stories seamlessly blending elements of dystopia with the contemporary landscape of Belarus, offering a compelling exploration of national trauma.
In 2020, the blatantly rigged Presidential election in Belarus sparked an enormous wave of peaceful protests that were met with repression and violence. Thousands ended up in prison, hundreds of thousands in exile, the entire nation traumatised. Tony Lashden tries to find an allegorical language to speak about this immense trauma, all the while taking a decolonial stance against Russian imperialism.
In Black Woods, the act of crossing a border exacts a heavy toll, demanding a sacrifice of self, and a summon letter to the deadly marshes awaits in your mailbox. This is no mere flight of fancy; rather, it is a stark reflection of contemporary Belarus, where reality blurs with dystopian hues. Against the backdrop of timeless Belarusian landscapes—swamps, villages, and fields of potatoes and grain—a tapestry of human experiences unfolds, weaving together themes of fear, trauma, loss, and resilience.
In 2020, the blatantly rigged Presidential election in Belarus sparked an enormous wave of peaceful protests that were met with repression and violence. Thousands ended up in prison, hundreds of thousands in exile, the entire nation traumatised. Tony Lashden tries to find an allegorical language to speak about this immense trauma, all the while taking a decolonial stance against Russian imperialism.
In Black Woods, the act of crossing a border exacts a heavy toll, demanding a sacrifice of self, and a summon letter to the deadly marshes awaits in your mailbox. This is no mere flight of fancy; rather, it is a stark reflection of contemporary Belarus, where reality blurs with dystopian hues. Against the backdrop of timeless Belarusian landscapes—swamps, villages, and fields of potatoes and grain—a tapestry of human experiences unfolds, weaving together themes of fear, trauma, loss, and resilience.