Kasia Buczkowska is a writer and translator in New York City, who writes very short fiction in Polish and English. She studied English Philology at the University of Warsaw and English Literature and Film at Columbia University and she says that she “fell into writing fiction, felicitously” living in New York. She has published her “short takes,” so named by Rosanna Warren, in Literary Imagination, Clarion, and in Przegląd Polski, the cultural supplement to Nowy Dziennik in New York, to which she also contributes articles and reviews. Her first book is a collection of such short takes — with a quality of foreignness to the voice that forms quirky folk-tales and vignettes, urban and pastoral, in Prose.

From in Prose:

The Fly Bit the Cow

A cow stood on the grass. Grandma was milking the cow. The milk was flowing into the bucket. A fly was cruising around the cow. Granddaughter was chasing the fly with a birch branch. “Grandma, where is God?” “God lives in your heart and he will always whisper to you whenever you move away from him.” The cow was stretching its ear. “God is also in this grass, on which the bucket stands, and in this milk that fills the bucket to the brim, and in this cow that gives the milk, and everything wants to live its own life.” The cow nodded. The girl held the branch still. The fly bit the cow. The irritated cow swung its tail. Grandma knocked over the bucket. The milk spilled on the grass. “Nobody will drink milk today. Everything has its boundaries,” Grandma said. The cow nodded.