“Rumbles on Cobblestone” by Barbara Krasner appeared in Issue 44 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I started this story during a generative writing session using the Amherst Writers & Artists Method several years ago. It’s based on my experiences in July 2011 when I spent a month with Western Michigan University in fiction and Jewish Studies workshops in Prague. The image of Kafka was everywhere and I made it my mission to visit the places where he lived, worked, rode his motorbike, wrote, and hoisted a few with his friends.
I worked with several mentors on this piece since I’m relatively new to magical realism. But I am a firm believer in standing in the place where my stories take place. I think it makes a difference in this story that I spent a month in Prague and know the places I describe, including the sausage kiosks and the cinema in New Town.
What was the most difficult aspect of writing this story?
The appearance and moments where Amalia and Kafka interact.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
The Latecomer (2022) by Jean Hanff Korelitz. I am now totally intrigued by ekphrasis.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Amor Towles. I was introduced to his work, specifically Rules of Civility, through a Smithsonian Associates program on Art through Fiction and was mesmerized afterward by A Gentleman in Moscow.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on another magical realism story about female collective memory and an ancient Athena coin and a novel about a post-World War II displaced person newly arrived in America in 1951.
Our thanks to Barbara for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Rumbles on Cobblestone” here.
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Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author of fiction and her short story, “The Newcomer,” won the 2024 Folio Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Folio Literary Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Vassar Review, and elsewhere. A former German major, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Holocaust & Genocide Studies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.