It's only a five-minute walk from poverty to wealth (An Extract from Frans Pointl's 'The Rich Have Awkward Sizes')

A critic once wrote that Frans Pointl's short stories are populated with people like himself: ‘they hover between the social and the antisocial'. The Amsterdam Soup Kitchen, grimy coffee tables, his ‘dingy, dead-end street', the comforting companionship of ‘ex-stray cats', Pointl's Jewish mother and a peculiar uncle who is subject to severe depressions ‘in which he is supported by King Alcohol': that is the setting for the stories in his collection 'The Rich Have Awkward Sizes'.