Rzeczy robione specjalnie [Things Done on Purpose]

Rights sold to Serbia.

The consequences of putting on a sock can never be fully gauged, is what we learn from Emilia Konwerska’s debut collection of short stories.

Rzeczy robione specjalnie is a collection of potential mental journeys for everyone who has ever felt like a diver trapped under the ice; of perilous internal adventures where nothing happens and where everything happens, all at once; and finally, a diorama of things we never think about, which can only mean that we think about them all the time.
Konwerska pulls the reader into a labyrinth of smoke-and-mirrors prose where a whole adventure can begin and end while going down a flight of stairs. These stories aren’t made of beginnings, middle bits and endings; they’re all made of twists and peaks. And yet, while the author enjoys testing both limits of the genre and her reader’s expectations, she doesn’t shy away from asking questions about the nature of relationships and different forms of intimacy, boundaries and insecurities.

Emilia Konwerska uses literary language like it’s a familiar, well-worn object, except that she chooses to use it against its original purpose. Attention-deficient, hyperactive prose, perhaps? This might be your only chance to take a turn in a direction that moments ago, didn’t even exist.

Publication date: October 2025

Nominations and awards: 

• Odkrycia Empiku Award nominee

Rights sold:

• Serbia (Imperativ Publishing)
  

About the Author:

Emilia Konwerska is a poet, literary scholar, publicist and curator. Before writing prose, she published two poetry collections: 112 and Ostatni i pierwszy kajman. Each earned her a nomination to the prestigious Gdynia Literary Prize. Her books have been translated to Ukrainian and Serbian. She lives in Wrocław.

Praise for Rzeczy robione specjalnie:

Emilia Konwerska, literary critic and poet twice-nominated for the Gdynia Literary Prize, figured out the workings of her readers’ behavioral immune system very well. With her debut short story collection, Konwerska toys with our sense of emotional wellbeing, constantly provoking irritation or anxiety, sometimes teetering on the verge of nausea. She plays the reader’s expectations with skill and bravado, challenging our every instinct that tells us to behave in certain ways, or else the society might reject us.

– Monika Ochędowska, Gazeta Wyborcza

Konwerska is Leonora’s Carrington’s perfect granddaughter, sharing the same love for surreal journeys to those rarely-visited nooks and crannies of everyday imagination. She collects the weird and wonderful pieces of the most quotidian, turning literature into a space of very contemporary nonchalance worthy of the main character of Otessa Mosfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

– Magdalena Nowicka-Franczak, Tygodnik Powszechny
Perhaps if Adelheid Duvanel were alive today, and a bit less unhappy and dark, she’d be producing little pieces just like these.

– Izabela Adamczewska-Baranowska, Dziennik Literacki

Rzeczy robione specjalnie is a collection of short pieces about the anxiety, loneliness and hilarity of the human existence. Konwerska writes rebelliously, brilliantly, in microscopic literary explosions, created to pop the balloon of our everyday routine.

– Aleksandra Pakieła, Vogue