Alisa Ganieva
Alisa Ganieva’s short story Munkar and Nakir in Sabrina Jaszi’s translation came out in the Words without Borders magazine. Scholars Hilah Kohen and Josephine von Zitsewitz write in the same magazine: «Thanks to translator Carol Apollonio, readers may already be familiar with Alisa Ganieva’s novels. Here, the prominent writer and activist takes on a different genre: short-form regional noir, though it is set in a region that genre does not typically include. As a man named Kebedov drives through rural Dagestan (a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s Northern Caucasus Mountains), he finds himself inside a kind of real-life trolley problem whose resolution rests on a single theological conversation with a stranger. It’s inside their dialogue, and not in a complex plot, that Ganieva hangs the suspense of the narrative: in her hands, every word changes what the future can be, or whether it can even exist».
