Author(s): Christos Ikonomou (Trans: Karen Emmerich)

Short Stories | Fiction Reductions | Translated fiction | Greece

In the urban sprawl between Athens and Piraeus, the narratives of these stories roam restlessly through the impoverished working-class quarters located off the tourist routes. It's 2011 and the now well-documented Greek economic crisis of 2014 is well underway. Everyone is dreaming of escape: to the mountains, to an island or a palatial estate, into a Hans Christian Andersen story world. What are they fleeing? The old woes - gossip, watchful neighbours and the oppression and indifference of the rich - now made infinitely worse.

Review: "In Ikonomou's timely novel, the human fallout of the Greek economic recession is writ large. . . . Concerned with the bottom rungs of the social ladder, [these] pieces . . . cover an astonishing range. . . . These stories add up to a panorama of the human spirit under siege and a searing indictment of the failures to reform the Greek infrastructure." -- Publishers Weekly

"[Ikonomou's] characters might feel like they are suffering private tragedies, but SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN repeatedly calls our attention to the subtle human connections that remain. . . . Karen Emmerich deserves special praise for her translation of Ikonomou's charming, vernacular, and energetic prose." - Bookforum

"This collection is a kind of Dubliners for the postcrisis generation and a lament for the marginalized inhabitants of neighborhoods around the shipping district of Piraeus. Ikonomou succeeds at immersing the reader, through a panoramic stream-of-consciousness method of narration, into fifteen lives where "pain and fear come later, when the wound cools[...]" Ikonomou is an author of substance as much as style, and Something Will Happen, You'll See is a stunning, if somewhat bleak, sketch of a country in flux." - World Literature Today


"Ikonomou's Something Will Happen, You'll See depicts many lives, of all ages, that have been blighted by financial hardship. The book stands with Rafael Chirbes's On the Edge as one of the remarkable literary interpretations of the recent global downturn." - Barnes & Noble Review

"Stylistically and thematically reminiscent of Raymond Carver. . . Set in contemporary Greece, these stories focus on characters struggling to maintain their dignity, relationships and self-worth in a failing society." - Shelf Awareness

"These stories are pitch-perfect, with sullen anger, wit, sharp humor, and tragicomedy captured in sharply crafted scenes that linger in the memory... Karen Emmerich is quickly establishing herself as one of our finest contemporary translators from Greek to English... If someone is interested in understanding the very human face of Greece's working class, and discovering a very talented and unsettling writer, I'd say buy this book." - Stephanos Papadopoulos in Los Angeles Review of Books