Life and Limb: Selected Tales of Peril, Predicament, and Dire Distress

Thirty bleak short stories about helpless people in hopeless situations. My kind of book, then.

And reading through the table of contents warmed my heart: Whilst there are a few stories by anglophones, others were written by authors from places as scattered as Syria, Japan, Nicaragua, Russia, Iraq, and Venezuela. Better still, even though most of the fiction I read is in translation I'd not heard of most of these writers.

The quality of the stories varies of course, and Alter-Gilbert's introductions to them are at times weirdly purple. They're helpful, though, and some of these writers' lives sound as horrendous as the situations they describe.