BagatelleNo Stops
On a train. The conductor asks for my ticket. I realise I haven’t bought one. I ask: “All right, where is this train heading?” “How should I know? Do I look like I work here?” The…
Bagatelle
Ingemar
I’m standing in the shower thinking about Ingemar. It’s been a while since I thought about him. I used to think about him all the time. He was an echo of reality in the unreal. He…
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BagatelleElementary Things
One of those damn undocumented people further down in the building had thrown an entire Christmas tree down the rubbish chute. Then people had kept chucking their Christmas and New…
BagatelleRelate to This
There was just so much going on at the time. Arranging the funeral and all the Christmas fuss, marking exams and answering emails, planning the next term and being an inspiring…
BagatelleMother of the Flies
She was just about to take one last sip of rosé when her lips unexpectedly met something slightly furry and wriggling. She closed her mouth and held the glass at a distance. There…
BagatelleGangster Signal
During the annual visit to the school nurse, when the children were measured and weighed, the growth angles of their spines examined, questions about diet answered, and forecasts…
BagatelleThe Postman
On the way out, you share the elevator with the postman, who somewhere between the third and second floors asks: “Are you the one who wrote about Kant?” He knows other things too…
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Essay93 notes to myself
You are at a party, you know no one, but intend to change that. Or you are new to the job market, without yet knowing what you want to do. Or you start an English-language…
BagatelleA Bit Like George Saunders
O says that what I write reminds him of George Saunders and hands me a book that I lug with me across the country on my backpack tour. I don’t dare read more than a little, because…
BagatelleCounter 27
At the railway station in Chișinău, I joined a queue and waited my way to the front to ask for a ticket to Odessa, only to be brusquely referred, with an eye-roll, to counter 27…
Longer stories Explore novels & serials
Novel · Private readingZenopolis
A boy called a miracle, and the tangled lives that made him possible.
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Novel · Private readingThe Last Siamese
A vanished world, magical realism and a summer of wild imagination.
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Novel · Private readingBardo Noir
Black and white, smoke and mirrors, adventures around every corner.
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Serial fiction · 3 partsThe Wind Chime Chronicles
We begin high in the sky. It is early morning and the earth has just rotated the sun into view, its rays falling at an angle across the glittering grand apartments along the…
Serial fiction · 5 partsNaïveté Travels
In the autumn of 2004, I was in Belgrade with my then-girlfriend. Late one Friday, we stumbled upon Ryanair tickets for one krona and went for it. We strolled, after a long day of…
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Your letters of escapism
The Bagatelles began on Substack on 24 February 2025. Today, more than 5,000 subscribers in over 110 countries receive these dispatches of fiction, essays and other departures.
All 52 original dispatches are gathered here, in the order they found their readers.
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