Fierce and sophisticated, dark and dreamy, The Black Box is a collection of transgressive, poetic fiction by Mata Kastrisiou. Each story reveals an unsettling vision of the fantastic merging with the everyday. A homeless person beds down for the night on New Year s Eve, schoolchildren compete for a trip to meet their favorite cartoon character, a murderous domestic melodrama unfolds on a distant asteroid, an elderly man reckons with his failing memory on an empty beach Kastrisiou explores these points of view and more with economy of language and acute social consciousness. Ranging from the darkly comic to the tender and gently melancholy, Kastrisiou writes with empathy, lack of pretense, and a deep insight into our shared humanity. Now in English for the first time, this writer of rare sensibility is sure to entrance readers of Kate Folk, Edouard Louis, and Ottessa Moshfegh.