Black Vodka: Ten Stories

This collection of ten very short stories by Levy (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for her story collection, Swimming Home) takes place in familiar European cities—London, Dublin, Vienna, Prague, and Barcelona—and features characters who are either deformed, displaced, or deranged. Deformed, as in the title story, "Black Vodka," in which a successful ad executive with a congenital hump on his back meets an attractive archaeologist who takes a more than scientific interest in him. Displaced, as in the story, "Shining a Light," in which a young woman traveling to Prague loses her luggage and is helped out by a group of Serbian refugees who have lost everything. Deranged, as in "Stardust Nation," another story about ad men, in which Nick, suffering a mental breakdown, assumes the identity of his boss and his boss's shocking, trauma-filled past.