Crackers and Bores

The books of Swedish writer Ulf Stark (winner of national and international literary prizes—the August Prize, the German Children’s Prize, and the Astrid Lindgren Prize) are well known and loved in Russia and around the world. In his stories everything is like in life: the child grows up with the child, and a complex modern world opens to them—of blissful and clumsy people, oddballs and fussy bores…

The heroine of Stark’s novella “Dorks and Nerveheads”—twelve-year-old Simone—has a very hard time living among the “dorks and idiots” who have moved into her house: with the woman who can’t remember anything forever (including her daughter’s birthday and her dog Kilroy’s when they moved) and gave up trying to “be a normal” mother—by her awkward husband. What’s more, at her new school Simone is taken for a boy because of her unusual name, and she has to do everything to avoid ending up in an awkward situation, even starting a “boyish career”…