Trivialities

Trivialities (2025)
Gibbon Moon Books 

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was a Russian absurdist writer, a dissident and satirist who was imprisoned by the regime during the Second World War and died of starvation in a prison cell in Leningrad. His works were rescued from oblivion by friends and clandestinely preserved for several decades before the cultural climate in the Soviet Union loosened sufficiently to permit piecemeal publication. He is now renowned for a sequence of very brief stories, typically violent, acerbic, nightmarish yet comical snapshots of an oppressive reality in which truth and dream are seamlessly blended.

Trivialities is a tribute to Kharms. Here are eighty flash fictions that attempt to express admiration for the modes, themes and ironies of Kharms' microfictions. The nightmare endures as people are thrown out of windows, crushed by trams, flown into the sides of mountains, launched from catapults, bisected by guillotines, sealed alive in coffins. And often but not always they are resurrected in otrder to be destroyed by some other method. Meanwhile, Daniil Kharms himself waits for the sentence of starvation to be carried out in full, doing his best in secret to delay the process.