About the Book

Other Lives is a collection of short stories by Miha Mazzini about points of rupture— in our own lives, in the lives of others, and in the space between our life and another. What connects them is a clear red (or black?) thread of questions of identity and its limits, which are never simply the boundaries of our own world. The destinies of our spouses, children, parents, long-forgotten classmates, the bullies who broke us, and inevitably the society we live in—whose rules we scarcely notice even as we cling to them—adhere to us. At times, the stories understand the “other life” quite literally; at others, they unravel it through the voice of a German soldier, a caregiver in a retirement home, the postman of a famous writer, or a writer who urgently needs to write our story.