Thirty bleak short stories about helpless people in hopeless situations. My kind of book, then.

And reading through the table of contents warmed my heart: Whilst there are a few stories by anglophones, others were written by authors from places as scattered as Syria, Japan, Nicaragua, Russia, Iraq, and Venezuela. Better still, even though most of the fiction I read is in translation I'd not heard of most of these writers.

The quality of the stories varies of course, and Alter-Gilbert's introductions to them are at times weirdly purple. They're helpful, though, and some of these writers' lives sound as horrendous as the situations they describe.