The main characteristics of Slovene postmodern narrative are plurality, heterogeneity and a flourishing of genre writing. The boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature are being erased, while varieties of mass, popular or trivial literature are adopting a ‘high’ form and style. Genre writing is becoming established above all thanks to literary globalization, to which can be ascribed the appearance, since 1990, of authors who have successfully published science fiction, crime novels and novels with historical, espionage, horror or erotic-pornographic elements and themes. The selection of authors for this anthology is based primarily on the generic elements in their short stories, which cannot in most cases be characterized as “typical” genre short stories, as many are merely a parody or imitation of a genre, which testifies to certain postmodern procedures skillfully employed by authors to create a genre-type story. In some stories, there are apparent only fragments of generic elements, in others the emphasis is on stylistic generic imitation or on ironic literary strategies. This volume represents a selection of short stories which could roughly be labelled as genre, because they range from crime and science-fiction to vampire stories, some of them making expressively direct use of genre elements, at times even brutal eroticism that may in places come close to the pornographic description of sexuality.
The selection criterion for inclusion in this volume was above all the presence of genre elements, for pure genre stories are like the proverbial needle in the haystack in Slovenia, as there are very few writers here involved exclusively in genre prose. Thus, with the exception of Edo Rodošek, none of the presented authors is a writer of genre literature.
From the afterword by Irena Svetek