I Tried is the writer’s first published prose work: it consists of five short stories, all five written at different times and published in different literary magazines. The stories are based on social themes and involved contemporary Georgia. The genres vary: Simple Mathematics is wholly humorous prose, but Kaia is a mystical drama. But the fundamental feature of all five stories is light humour and the narrator’s ironical self.

The story Heaven is about the love affair of a young, principled television producer and a girl acrobat, trained in China: it takes place against the background of a ‘talent show’. Everything in the couple’s relationship is ideal, the exact opposite of the sordid reality concealed in the show’s working office. People and relationships are being sacrificed for the sake of ratings. Plots, actions, yells, complaints and hysteric… All this, towards the end of the story, leads us to a dramatic finale.  The story My Father - A normal, traditional Georgian family, seen through the eyes of a four-year-old boy: the head of the family makes his visitors, who have come for a party, drink wine from the galoshes he wore when he came from the city; a Santa Claus, brought in to entertain the children, is pathologically drunk; the father asks the main hero to let his guests see his ‘ID papers’; the child hasn’t yet said the word ‘idiot’, but to express his feelings completely he comes out with a shocking swear-word.

Winning Knucklebone - what is a dinner set made of hedgehog enamel? At first sight, it’s just an utterly harmless set of bowls and other vessels, but for Babazi it is quite a different thing, it is a different warmth and extraordinarily involved memories. Such memories inevitably involve great danger and one morning, when he wakes up with a bad hangover, it appears that he might set off somewhere remote to bury his neighbour’s dog. Here he will inevitably meet policemen who want to congratulate him. In the end, if the killer of his neighbour’s dog is a girl he was looking after called Melano Brezhneva, then why should the policeman he gets to know this morning not be called Brezhnev, too?

Simple Mathematics  -the city has its own mathematics, basic mathematics, that of an elementary beginner’s class: a boy who leaves from point A, whose speed has turned out to be unpropitious, nevertheless meets a rhythmic girl with a boring life who has left point B: they meet at point G, because this is Tbilisi and Tbilisi is too small for two persons standing on the same line to avoid getting to know one another.

Kaia - the main thing is to remember after death how you wanted to be, not how you were in actual fact. That really is the main thing! Otherwise a girl you happen to meet at the cemetery through the lenses of a camera, may know you already, or a man who has seen you in an empty metro carriage may be a drunken god and miracles might really happen and a beam of light might be a simple slice of time.

‘As a rule, the first book is only an introduction of a new name and if one remembers the author, it’s already an achievement. However, it happens that the very first collection ushers in a true writer, so when one of his stories, The Sky, was published in our magazine Arili, I immediately sensed we were dealing with the instance when a young author was to prove he was the one who was here to stay.‘

Shadiman Shamanadze,writer, literary critic

‘He is original, with a good sense of humour”, the jury said when giving Iva Pezuashvili the First Prize in the student competition. Since then I have been following his prose, becoming convinced that every new piece of writing was like a step leading upwards, towards the sky and soon his story THE SKY was published. He involved me in the narration, made me believe it, made me laugh, surprised me and then grabbed my heart, blocked my breathing... I looked up at the sky, thinking he was great to write like this.’

Teona Dolenjashvili, writer