Pavol Rankov – On the Other Hand

On the Other Hand is a short story collection by the award-winning Slovak author, Pavol Rankov. As the title implies, there is a duality to the stories in this volume – half of them are set in contemporary times and places and cover subjects such as immigration, refugees, drug use, and mental illness. The other half are set in distant lands with palaces and kings, and they read like fairy tales in which people dig to the other side of the Earth, build cities for the virtuous, and live alternate versions of their lives. The common thread in all of them is that Rankov takes a seemingly ordinary situation and pushes it to an extreme, and in doing so, he reveals some truth about human nature.