Selected by
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
as one of the Ten Best Fiction Books of 2003.
The Noonday Cemetery & Other Stories
, selected by Herling himself shortly before his death in 2000, is a collection of thirteen brilliant stories spanning the last twenty years of his life. His novel
The Island
was published to great acclaim in 1993, and his memoir,
A World Apart
, is among the most powerful accounts of life in the Soviet gulag.
Volcano and Miracle
, published in 1996, contains short fiction and prose writings from his
Journal Written at Night
. But nowhere before have Herling's best stories—and Herling was indeed a master of the short story—been compiled and published in English translation. In "The Noonday Cemetery," an eerie graveyard on an Italian hillside overlooks the sea and hides the secrets of a murder (or suicide?). "Beata, Santa" describes the plight of a young Polish woman raped by Serbs, who is pressured by the Catholic Church to keep her child. In "A Madrigal of Mourning," a Russian woman musicologist becomes obsessed with Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, a madrigalist and murderer. These timeless stories, dealing with moral, often historical, subjects and written in passionate, deeply affecting prose, affirm without a doubt the assessment by
The Boston Globe
that Herling is "a writer of stylistic mastery and moral depth, who deserves to be placed among the best in any language."