Romanian novelist Doina Ruști has published her short story The Wallachian Hound (Ogarul valah) in the American literary magazine Conjunctions, in its Online Exclusive section, in English translation.
Founded in New York in 1981 by writer and editor Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions is one of America's leading literary magazines, renowned for innovative literature, experimental fiction, and the exploration of unconventional narrative forms.
Over more than four decades, the magazine has published works by writers such as Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates, Roberto Bolaño, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, William H. Gass, Thomas Bernhard, and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Bradford Morrow, the magazine's founder and editor, is an American novelist known for his fiction exploring mysteries, manuscripts, and rare documents. His books include The Forgers (2014), The Diviner's Tale (2011), and The Prague Sonata (2017), a novel about an eighteenth-century musical manuscript divided into three parts to save it during the Nazi occupation of Prague. The discovery of one of the musical scores, decades later, sets off a search spanning several countries and historical periods. In The Forger's Requiem (2025), Morrow returns to the world of manuscript forgers and literary mysteries.
The short story The Wallachian Hound (Ogarul valah) is set in Bucharest in 1740 and draws on the fascination with Wallachian hounds, hunting dogs highly prized in the Ottoman Empire.
Anton, a greyish-white hound with human eyes, disappears one afternoon, leaving his master unable to explain what has happened. Not long afterwards, a stranger appears at the gate of a house and declares:
“I am Anton, and an hour ago I was a dog.”
Structured as a reconstruction based on documents, complaints, and mysterious testimonies, the story follows a series of metamorphoses, disappearances, and inexplicable events.
The fantastic emerges from the details of everyday life, from subtle suggestions and documents that seem to preserve the traces of a vanished world.
The Wallachian Hound belongs to Doina Ruști's literary universe, where history and the Balkan imagination intersect with the fantastic, and the past becomes the substance of stories about identity, desire, and metamorphosis.
Read the full story in Romanian
The publication of The Wallachian Hound in Conjunctions introduces American readers to an important dimension of Doina Ruști's fiction: her exploration of the Balkan imagination and the fantastic inspired by eighteenth-century history.
The author has developed this fictional universe in her novels The Phanariot Manuscript (Manuscrisul fanariot), The Book of Perilous Dishes (Mâța Vinerii), and Homeric, as well as in numerous short stories in which characters and events move between history, legend, and fiction.
Known to English-language readers through her novel The Book of Perilous Dishes (London, 2022), Doina Ruști has had her work translated into 18 languages, with more than 40 titles published in translation.
Her recent novels include Ferenike (Humanitas, 2025), Nas de bulgar (Humanitas, 2026), and Matuf, the Wigmaker(Humanitas Junior, 2026).
The Wallachian Hound — Doina Ruști (Romanian version)
Conjunctions, November 11, 2026 (English version)
Doina Ruști is a contemporary Romanian novelist known for her Balkan imagination, historical fantastic fiction, and novels exploring communism and identity. Her work is studied in schools and universities and has received numerous literary awards, including the Romanian Academy Prize.
Website: https://www.doinarusti.ro
