Partly parables, partly fairy tales, You Do Understand is a comedy of errors for a species of talkers who’ve never learned to listen. This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching, and yet always generous short-short fictions addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understand what we want and need. Demonstrating that language and intimacy are as much barriers between human beings as ways of connecting them, Andrej Blatnik here provides us with a guided tour of the slips, misunderstandings, and blind alleys we each manage to fall foul of... continue
Khadeeja is a child who is forced into womanhood early. She is compelled to marry a man much older than she through arranged marriage and lives a world of hardships from then on. Her mother dies soon after her wedding, leaving her with a husband she hardly knows and two brothers she knows nothing of. Khadeeja learns to love her husband and win his love in return, but just as she thought her life was a beautiful love story her precious son dies from a scorpion bite. Grief and sadness become her new best friends. Her husband, whom she can't live without, abandons her without warning and she is l... continue