Taming of the Bitch

• Stories of Madness
• Venko Andonovski

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Taming of the Bitch is an experimental book, a short story collection, subtitled “Stories of Madness”. About his book, the author, Venko Andonovski, had said: “In the cycle Frescoes, I am my good old self, as you may know me from Frescoes and Grotesques and from my novels; I even made variations of my well-known themes from Frescoes and Grotesques, and the style is the same. In Small Icons I attempted to retain the concept of the sublime, but condense the expression (sentence), so I ended up with something odd and personally quite interesting – stories with philosophical points, but also stories quite similar to prose poetry. And in the third cycle, To Caricatures and Grotesques, I tried to combine the story with something that had so far been incompatible: reality, and make it engaged. I’ve never written a story about reality, about the “here and now”, having always written about the past, as a metaphor for today. Still, I’ve done this twist towards the “here and now” through all my plays, and they were most often farces, or plays of an ironic style. Here and now I tried to shape the story ironically and critically and have it face this time of caricatures and our madness. The work is composed so as to show our fall from our most exalted to our lowest. Madness can also be exalted: Edgar Alan Poe claimed that it was the highest form of intelligence. But madness can also be low, on the level of clinical ideological insanity. The former is the madness of the fulfilled, and the latter of the vacant man. Madness always occurs as a reaction to the unattainable. But it is precisely this unattainable that, in creative madness, paradoxically, fulfills maximally, and with the most noble human characteristic – want. Creation is a state of maximal fulfillment with want. With this collection of short stories I wanted to contribute to the return to story, especially since it appears to me that the novel has lately somehow become a literary fad, and the short story, the peak of prose (in my opinion) – has lost its popularity and its readers. It’s time to return it to the readers. With all the wealth of our understanding what a short story is.”

• ISBN: 978-953-369-008-7
• Dimensions: 128 x 190 mm
• Number of pages: 336
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2022
• Original title: Pripitomuvanje na kučkata. Raskazi za ludiloto
• Original language: Macedonian
• Translation: Borislav Pavlovski