You Can’t Talk This Way and Other Short Stories
By Danuta Borchardt
Fiction
September 2025
ISBN: 978-1736465837
Description
In You Can’t Talk This Way and Other Short Stories, Danuta Borchardt presents a collection of twenty-seven inventive, thought-provoking short stories, written in varied styles and lengths. This diverse collection emerges from the unpredictable depths of the author’s subconscious while remaining rooted in life’s stark realities and universal themes. Many of the stories reflect a surrealist sensibility — a style Borchardt uses not to escape reality but to highlight its complexities. These narratives invite readers to experience the absurdities, contradictions, and underlying truths of human existence.
Borchardt’s tales travel from the suppressive shadows of Soviet rule to the sweeping deserts of America, each story tinged with both personal insight and broad social commentary. Whether surreal, whimsical, darkly humorous, or poignantly real, her writing challenges conventions and expectations, offering narratives that are as entertaining as they are intellectually stirring. You Can’t Talk This Way is a vibrant exploration of the borderlands between the real and the surreal — a unique collection sure to resonate with readers of literary fiction and lovers of the unexpected.
A bold collection of twenty-seven stories blending surrealism with stark reality. Danuta Borchardt crafts vivid tales drawn from personal experience, universal truths, and life’s contradictions. From oppressive regimes to American deserts, these thought-provoking narratives subvert expectations and invite reflection, challenging readers to see the real through a surreal lens.
Biography
Danuta Borchardt is a Polish-born émigré, living in the United States since 1959. She is a retired psychiatrist and retired Instructor of Clinical Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Now a writer of short stories, some surrealist and influenced by André Breton’s Surrealist Movement in the 1920s, which were published in the “Exquisite Corpse” in the 1980s-1990s.
Borchardt has traveled extensively through the backlands and other parts of the United States. A stranger to this land, she found these places exotic, and they provided inspiration for many of her stories. She has earned Russell Banks’ opinion that her writing is “on the borderland of Polish and South American surrealism yet grounded on the American soil.”
She is an awarded translator of Polish Literature, and in 2018 she was a participant in a translation of the scholarly writings by Janusz Korczak (1878-1942) a Polish educator, martyred by the Germans; all above are into English. She is best known for having brought to Anglophone readers four novels by the internationally acclaimed Polish exile writer Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969): Ferdydurke (Yale, 2000), Cosmos (Yale, 2005), Pornografia (Grove, 2009), and Trans-Atlantyk (Yale 2014). Borchardt’s translations of Gombrowicz’s novels have enjoyed tremendous critical success. She has been awarded the National Translation Award, a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Found in Translation Award, and a nomination for the Pen Literary Translation Award.
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