My Husband
SynopsisPlot
In these eleven devastatingly precise and psychologically unsettling stories, we follow the female protagonists’ thwarted attempts at intimacy, ranging from pretense, to denial, to violent and ultimately self-destructive acts. This smart, funny, provocative collection demonstrates the profound skills that have made Rumena Bužarovska one of the finest contemporary writers of short fiction in Macedonia. This story collection Mojot Maž in Croatian (My Husband in English), won the Edo Budiša Award for Best Short Story Collection.
Story
About this book
My Husband is a collection of eleven short stories by Macedonian writer Rumena Bužarovska. Each story is narrated by a woman reflecting on her marriage, and together they form a sharp, often darkly comic portrait of domestic life. The narrators describe their husbands with a mix of frustration, resignation, and occasional bewilderment, revealing the gaps between what these women expected from partnership and what they actually experience day to day.
The stories explore failed attempts at closeness. Some narrators maintain careful pretenses to keep their marriages intact. Others have moved past pretense into quiet denial or open conflict. Bužarovska writes with psychological precision, giving each narrator a distinct voice while building a cumulative picture of how power, habit, and disappointment shape long relationships. The tone shifts between dry humor and genuine unease, sometimes within the same paragraph.
Originally published in Macedonian under the title Mojot Maž, the collection won the Edo Budiša Award for Best Short Story Collection. Bužarovska is recognized as one of the leading contemporary short fiction writers from North Macedonia, and this English-language edition, translated and published by Dalkey Archive Press, brought her work to a wider international audience.
