Fictionable

This Summer series we've already heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu, Robin Munby and Zhenya Oliinyk. But we bring it to a close with Elaine Vilar Madruga and her short story Wild, translated from Spanish by Samantha Luna.

Wild is not only a story about vengeance, Vilar Madruga says, it's also "a story about hope".

"It's about sisterhood and it's about resilience," she continues. "It's about the possibility of survivors telling their own stories. Having their own agenda, Having our own words."

Women have always spoken about male violence, Vilar Madruga explains, but it's always been behind closed doors.

"Now we don't have any whisper of fear," she says, "we have a screaming voice. And that screaming voice allows us to share with the world what we are thinking and what our great-grandmothers and our grandmothers thought in their own lives."

Vilar Madruga cites the Cuban saying "pueblo pequeño, infierno grande" – a small town is a large hell. Even though her stories are fantastical, unmoored in time and place, she's still exploring the shared experience of "the woman in the street".

"My reality, my space, my spiritual biography, the territories where I live are not only mine," she says. "It's a human experience. It's not a Caribbean experience, or a Cuban experience or a Latin American experience, it's a human experience."

The themes that run through Wild – male violence, motherhood, sisterhood – echo through her latest novel, La piel hembra (The Female Skin). And Vilar Madruga also returns to the idea of metamorphosis, with Kafka's story of a man who becomes an insect always at the back of her mind.

"I'm always thinking in all my novels how men and women – the fictional characters – become monsters."
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We've heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu and Robin Munby already in this Summer series of podcasts, and Elaine Vilar Madruga is lined up next. But this week we welcome Zhenya Oliinyk and her graphic short story A Night in Kyiv.

This story is short and made up of unsettling images, but Oliinyk tells us it's "not exactly fiction".

"It is a documentation of one particular night," she says, "in terms of the numbers, because the numbers are real."

Oliinyk charts the night in a series of alerts as the ballistic missiles come down, the hits are confirmed and the death toll rises. And through it all runs the struggle to get some sleep.

"This is pretty much how it is happening," the author explains. "It happens on a regular basis now, in Kyiv and in other big cities as well."

Making art under Russian bombardment may be something of a challenge, but Oliinyk is resolutely practical.

"It is my occupation," she says. "It is what brings food to the table. So I would be insincere if I'd say that it's just my way of copying with the situation, it's just how my artistic spirit needs to manifest itself. But no, it's just what I do for a living."

Of course it's still meaningful and inspiring to share her work, she continues, but the brute realities of life remain. "Surprisingly, when the war starts you still have to pay rent and buy food. This is probably one of the biggest disappointments of the full-scale invasion."

With the news full of long-range strikes on oil refineries deep in Russian territory, it's tempting to imagine the war is at some sort of turning point. Retaking Crimea may feel like a distant dream, but "it still feels empowering to know that we're not helpless," Oliinyk says, "that we're not weak, that we can actually make some impact."
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This summer we've already heard from Will Boast and EC Osondu, and we'll be welcoming Elaine Vilar Madruga and Zhenya Oliinyk on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're heading north with Robin Munby and his short story Of All Who Sorrow, Joy.

Munby's narrator is adrift in language, an experience the author says is drawn from his own life.

"This is especially about that early phase of learning a language or living in a new place," he explains, "when you have some proficiency, but things are still a struggle."

At this stage, Munby continues, comprehension is often a matter of guesswork, but it's only a more extreme version of something that happens in your mother tongue. "You're half hearing what the other person is saying and filling in the gaps, which is often something we naturally do in conversation."

The narrator's blanks and missing pieces are echoed in the construction of a story built from fragments that cuts between a discussion about a journey and the journey itself. But it's no accident.

"I, as a reader, do very much enjoy writing that is ambiguous in that way," the author says.

As a translator from Spanish, Russian and Asturian, Munby's day-to-day tussles with language are very different from his narrator's. But translation itself is still something of a mystery.

"A lot of people invest a lot of time in explaining how to do it and analysing how it's done," he says, "and I find all of that fascinating. But I still find myself lost for words in terms of trying to describe how I do it."

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Will Boast kicked off this Summer series of podcasts, discussing the bureaucracy and hostility that immigrants face all around the world. We'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby over the next few weeks. But this time we welcome EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat.

Osondu explains that he didn't start using Ubers because they were convenient. As a Black man in New York City, he was struggling to hail a cab until a passer-by told him about Uber.

"In less than five minutes," he says, "I got a ride."

He discovered that Uber drivers were often more interested in conversation than people driving cabs, and started to enjoy the strange intimacy of an app throwing you together with a stranger.

"It's highly unlikely that you'll meet that person again," Osondu explains. "There is some kind of freedom that comes with that, a certain lack of constraint. You don't censor yourself."

Even though he's been living in the US for more than a decade, the author still doesn't feel at home.

"The longer you live in America," he says, "the more conscious you are of your foreignness."

It's no surprise that American life is appearing in his fiction, Osondu continues. "Every writer who finds himself in any environment, you're like a sponge."

But an author isn't bound by their immediate surroundings. No writer "has ever been to Mars," he adds, but they've been "writing about Mars since the beginning of science fiction".
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The heat is on in London, so it's time for another set of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, EC Osondu, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby, but we launch into Summer with Will Boast and his story The Line.

Boast explains that this story came out of his own family's struggles with the US immigration system in the 1990s, after they moved from the UK when he was a child.

"We would get to the Federal Building in downtown," he says, "and literally if you didn't get in line by a certain hour you were not getting in the building."

The Line started off with a family much like his own, Boast continues, but as he thought about the "hierarchy of immigrants" he started making his characters "less comfortable in the English language".

"Polish immigrants are not thought about as much, I guess," he says, "and they are often more politically conservative than some groups. So I thought it would be interesting to take a character who has more conservative, right-leaning views on migration than I do and put that character in this scenario."

The long line stretching around the Federal Building is just the visible end of a figurative line stretching all around the world, Boast adds. "Behind the line of people actually there physically waiting to get their papers, their green cards, eventually their citizenship, of course, there's a huge line of people applying for visas, hoping and dreaming to get that chance to be in that physical line."

Even if his characters find a way through the bureaucratic nightmare, the west's ever-increasing hostility towards migrants is sure to exact some cost. But according to Boast, there's something about short fiction that makes them doomed from the start.

"Because of its formal rigour and its un-open-endedness as opposed to novels, which can stretch," he says, "a short story really won't work unless its ending is satisfying and feels fated in some way,"

We'll be tempting fate next time with EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat.
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