Guernica Editions

Nora Ikstena’s daring, charming, and often mischievous fiction opens up new paths not only for Latvian literature in English translation but for English literature itself.

With each new literary work, Nora Ikstena creates a world more thoughtful and emotional, revealing a soul of greater scope, yet more concentration. Compared to her previous work, the message delivered in this text [Life Stories] has become seemingly simpler, but precisely because of this it reaches the boundary of the impossible and the indescribable. A contained style combined with the multiple interpretations possible of the text so characteristic of the author’s work, cannot fail but convince the reader, not allowing for loss of attention.

A deceptive simplicity, a desire to make language burst into life, a care for the deep but none too reliable emotions that bind us – whether Nora Ikstena is describing a blossom-strewn porch in spring, a misunderstood daughter or an ingenuous prostitute’s inner world, her stories mine both sharp reality and storytelling gold from the overlooked ore of everyday.