[Stewart]

There's a Q&A with Aleksandar Hemon on Papercuts, the New York Times blog, regarding this volume.

On how the stories were selected:

By the time I was reading the submissions, each country was represented with, on average, three pieces — which is to say that I had about 100 pieces to read. A lot of reading that is. But the Dalkey Archive people winnowed that down from me — they had translated a lot more stories and then narrowed the selection. The project, in other words, generates translations — the pieces that are not published in the anthology might end up elsewhere. This is important, as languages like Lithuanian or Estonian have so few translators that those literatures were practically nonexistent in the United States. As for the missing countries, some of them just did not show up — that is, there was a deadline for submissions and we could not wait. Besides, if we featured every single European country the book would’ve been a thousand pages long. Next year, there might be a different line-up.