“Fairground Magician is a wonderful collection of short stories. Sensuous, charming, witty and urbane, Jelena Lengold’s stories of complex relationships and passions are both highly literary and highly readable. This collection has already won a number of European prizes: it deserves to be discovered and treasured by the British readers.”
Vesna Goldsworthy, author of Gorsky and Chernobyl Strawberries
The collection ‘Fariground Magician’ brings together stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and values that are perceptible only at exceptional moments. The narration moves from apparent realism to other genres, such as crime fiction, the thriller and erotic prose. Memories, intimations, and premonitions are infused in these stories with a tranquillity that accepts what fate brings, even when, as in the stories Pockets Full of Stones or Nosedive, efforts are made to change it. Lengold uses eroticism as a natural ingredient of human life, as an integrated tension consisting of two inseparable aspects – body and soul – energising stories like Love Me Tender, Fairground Magician, Zugzwang, Wanderings, and Aurora Borealis.
In Fairground Magician, Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts. In stories like It Could Have Been Me, Shadow, or Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery, she manages to leap over the wall between the bodily surface and the human interior in a very distinctive way. No matter how common the situations she depicts – whether it be broken marriages, unfulfilled expectations, or the motives of forlorn lovers – Lengold is constantly searching for the authentic, finding it within the sophisticated irony which is a trademark of her fiction.
”Fairground Magician is a collection of thirteen tales revolving around the various faces of the Gods of love, whether this is Eros, who represents love, sexual passion and naughty thoughts or Yue-Lao, who binds two people together with an invisible red string – it doesn’t matter, they will find themselves reflected within this book’s pages.”
Review – Gary Moon, Parrish Lantern
”Fairground Magician’ is a collection of short stories showcasing a breadth of imagination and skill. Like a painter utilising different techniques to create individual artworks, Lengold employs a variety of approaches in her stories which truly feel like brushstrokes on canvas.”
Andjelka Grubisic BRITIC
