The Door was Open

by Karine Khodikyan, Nazareth Seferian (Translator)

Overview

The short fiction of Karine Khodikyan can be described as intellectual fiction for women. These short stories with a "mystical touch" tell stories about women - young and old, happy and sad; even when the protagonist is not a woman, the story will immerse you into the life of a woman, revealing her role in anything and everything.

This book was published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia under the "Armenian Literature in Translation" Program.

Translated from the Armenian by Nazareth Seferian

Proofread by Michael Wharton

Publishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912894499
Publisher:	Glagoslav Publications B.V.
Publication date:	06/01/2022
Pages:	126
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Karine Khodikyan is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, fiction writer and journalist. She was the editor of the fiction and poetry division at Garun magazine for more than 12 years, and has been the editor-in-chief of Grakan Tert since 2011. She was the Deputy Minister of Culture and is currently the host of a TV show called Between You and Me on Public Television. Khodikyan's plays have been staged in Armenia, USA, Russia and Ukraine. She has published two books of plays and a book of short stories and is working on a humorous detective novel.

Table of Contents

The Door Was Open… 6

I wasn’t going 12

Etude 18

The Smell of Bread and Death 23

Five Cars Out of the Road 35

1^st of March 55

The Carpenter’s Name 55

The Town of Angels 62

The Eleventh Commandment 66

Before Eclipse 69

The Seventh Day 75

The Drowned 86

The Black Bed 94

Turnabout 104

Editorial Reviews

"Karine Khodikyan is one of Armenia's foremost writers, with a body of work encompassing plays, film and TV scripts, fiction, and journalism. Armenian literature, like others of the Caucasus, is surely under-represented in the English-speaking world, but now Khodikyan's collection of short fiction, The Door Was Open, has - via Nazareth Seferian's smooth translation - been made available in English with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Armenia." Rosie Milne, Asian Review of Books

"Khodikyan's deft prose accomplishes something quite rare: it plumbs the depths of the human psyche and presents moral quandaries in realistic ways without being didactic. Her wonderfully dark tales limn the boundary between reality and fantasy, the concrete and the fantastic. [...] Yet she never makes a final or definitive statement about an issue or person and often leave stings open ended, sometimes even turning things on their head at the very end. The result is evocative, sometimes scary, always interesting." Christopher Atamian, The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

"Khodikyan has a way of blurring time so the reader feels as though they're floating in time at times. The vivid prose style comes through at the time with a richly descriptive style at time sticky dark floors the translator has done a great job keeping such passages that add to the feel of darkness in the stories. I keep saying tales as there is at times a feeling of dark fairy tales in the collection." Winstonsdad's Blog

From the Publisher