Selin belongs to that rare type of writer who tells a story not straightforwardly but through a series of carefully chosen and cleverly arranged vivid details. Many of his stories resemble video-clips-visual, sparkling with humor, aphoristic comparisons, apt observations, and ready wit. He often employs fantastic plots involving unexpected metamorphoses to convey his wonder at life's inscrutable mysteries and inimitable beauty.

In the long story "The Parachutist", Death offers the hero, a champion parachutist, to fulfill his last wish as he is falling to earth with his defective parachute. The clever man asks for a spare parachute and Death automatically fulfills his wish realizing only too late that he has saved his life instead of killing him. Death starts pursuing the hero only to be outwitted every time in a series of harrowing and hilarious adventures.

In "Alpatovka", the crafty villagers openly steal from one another while pretending that it's the surrounding magic forest that swallows up their property and people. "It's simply not proper in Alpatovka to notice theft." In "The Sniper", a demobilized sniper "with pale blue eyes and pinpoint pupils" walks some 200 metres from the garrison gates, climbs a pine tree and camouflages himself. Each time he is found and transported home he escapes and sets another ambush so that soon the whole area is completely terrorized.

---

A collection of tales full of humor and imagination.

Alexander Selin, born in 1960 and trained as a physicist, has two fiction collections and the novel Videountermenschen to his name.