The Other Love Stories might be regarded as a modular novel. Its
eleven sequences can function both as self-contained prose pieces and as
episodes in a single narrative, whose central theme is failed love. This
failure can unfold at a number of levels, with each story bringing with
it an additional nuance, an additional idea to give shape to the whole.
In the book, two central characters pass from one sequence to the next,
namely the character of the narrator, who is a journalist for a local
newspaper, and his wife. Their story takes shape not only by means of
narratives from various periods in the narrator's life (childhood,
adolescence, the present), but also in the tales of secondary
characters, in which the narrator is involved in one way or another. One
after the other and in surprising ways, all these sequences provide
various angles from which love can be viewed, while failure, an idea
that insinuates itself at the close of the volume, demands that each
separate story and each choice made at one time or another by the
central character should be re-evaluated. One of the sequences of the
book, entitled Goose Chase, was published in the acclaimed American
anthology Best European Fiction - 2011, ed. by Aleksandar Hemon.
