The Night Circus

I found him one morning when I went to take out the rubbish. He lay in the grass, clutching a piece of dirty plastic in his tiny baby hands. 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.

Ur?u?a Kovalyk is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and social worker. She was born in 1969 in Ko?ice, eastern Slovakia and currently lives in the capital, Bratislava. She has published the short story collections, Neverné ?eny nezná?ajú vají?ka (Unfaithful Women Lay No Eggs, 2002) and Travesty ?ou(Travesty Show, 2004), and two novels, ?ena zo seká?a (The Second-hand Woman, 2008) and Krasojazdky?a (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, ?isté zviera (A Pure Animal), appeared in 2018.