I’d Like

Published by
Dalkey Archive
in April 2008
Greek Literature Series
Translated by
Karen Emmerich

Available translations also in:
Spanish and Catalan by Rayo Verde
Romanian by Minerva

About the book:

The thirteen short stories that make up Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like read like versions of an unwritten novel: each riveting tale resonates with the others, and yet a sense of their connectedness remains tantalizingly out of grasp. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of characters and events, signs and emotions, linked by the uncanny repetition of certain details: blossoming almond trees, red berets, bleeding feet, accidents small and large. Michalopoulou’s characters are both patently fictitious and profoundly real, as they move through a world in which even the smallest of everyday occurrences can take on enormous significance. I’d Like offers a touching, utterly unique reading experience from one of Greece’s most innovative young storytellers.

That kind of thing happens to us often. One of us will get sick and call the other to tell her about her symptoms, the doctor’s appointments, the tests. A few days later, whichever one of us was healthy has fallen ill, too. Years ago my sister developed a kidney stone. Then I got one, too. When they opened us up, they found a stone in each of our right kidneys, as big as a dried-up umbilical cord.

More about I’d Like

Read an excerpt at Words Without Borders

A master of metafictional writing reminiscent of the French nouveau roman writers of the ’50s and in particular Marguerite Duras, Greece’s Amanda Michalopoulou invites us to view the world of one story presented through a prismatic lens of all its characters in I’d Like, a collection of thirteen gritty and poignant short stories. – Monica Carter
Read the full review at Three Percent

Wonderfully polymorphous—is it novel, fictional biography, short story collection, or other?—and incredibly promiscuous in its tones and registers—vacillating with ease between melancholy and joy while yoking together the profoundly metaphysical and the commonly mundane—Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like cannot help but inspire in its readers a vertiginous delight. – George Fragopoulos
The Quarterly Conversation, June 2009

Michalopoulou’s tales are (…) delightful when they hit true.
Read the full review at Publishers Weekly

Do you feel that writing saves you from suffering, or was there something about writing this particular collection of short stories that was redemptive?
Both. All my books play with the idea that writing is a sort of salvation, and a lot of my heroes are trying to finish their own books. In Bad Weather, for instance, a girl is stealing other people’s diaries and postcards and photos in order to write a “real-life” novel. In As Many Times As You Can Bear It, a reincarnation of Kafka appears and walks like him and talks like him, quoting his diaries.
Read the author’s interview at Context