Agnomia by Slovak author Róbert Gál is a short piece from The Dalkey Archive Press publication, Best European Fiction 2012 (edited by Aleksandar Hemon). This review is part of a series intending to examine each story from the collection, in an effort to broaden awareness of both the project itself, and the excellent array of authors contained within.
Agnomia struggles to understand the artist's task, their place in the world, and the inherent futility of these efforts. Gál understands that literature is in crisis, has always been in crisis, and will remain forever so - and that it is the artist's responsibility to remain on the knife's edge of crisis and genius.
You can read the review here.
Other titles by Róbert Gál under review include:
---Signs and Symptoms
Other stories from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2012, include:
---Love
------Belgium (Flemish): de Martelaere, Patricia - My Hand is Exhausted
------Croatian: Hrgović, Maja - Zlatka
------Spanish (Galician): Fernández Paz, Agustín - This Strange Lucidity
---Desire
------Polish: Rudnicki, Janusz - The Sorrows of Idiot Augustus
------Irish: Rosenstock, Gabriel - “...everything emptying into white”
---Elsewhere
------Hungarian: Bán, Zsófia - When There Were Only Animals
------Swiss (Rhaeto-Romanic and German): Camenisch, Arno - Sez Ner
------Portuguese: Zink, Rui - Tourist Destination
---War
------Georgian: Dephy, David - Before the End
------Irish: Hogan, Desmond - Kennedy
------Russian: Davydov, Danila - The Telescope
---Thought
------Czech: Kratochvil, Jiří - I, Loshaď
------Estonian: Kõomägi, Armin - Logisticians Anonymous