Still Life with Herring and Without

«My task is not to explain reality, but to describe it as it is», — assures the author. You will believe it, start reading — and you won't even notice how you are transported from the real world into fiction,... into the looking-glass. «And this is my world, it is real, I live in it», — confirms one of the characters. This world may turn out to be a planet that a girl invented, or a dried-up well, where a peaceful happy life flows and people do not know what hunger is. The boundary between dream and reality, fiction and harsh truth blurs and disappears. Anna Agnich is a talented master, she is precise in her word choice, truthful in details, her colors and shades are strictly calculated. Her sense of language does not betray her, no matter who she appears as: a child or an adult, a scholar or an artist, a writer or a dragon. And the reader will guess who the hero of the story «I am an angel» is: it is indeed the author, a skilled trickster, for a writer is a creator. Anna Agnich was born in Kharkiv, lived in Kyiv, Moscow, New York, and Boston. There, her collection «The Girl in the Window» was published. Her stories and novellas were printed in magazines in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Canada, and the USA. Unfortunately, Anna Agnich will not see her new book — she passed away in 2019.