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"[A] sunny, can-do look at intense culture shock. Debeljak makes a humorous, self-effacing guide to her own story and the only complaint I have is that I wish she’d told us more. I hope someday she gives us a sequel."—Christian Science Monitor • "Witty and warm."—Kirkus Reviews Forbidden Bread is an unusual love story that covers great territory, both geographically and emotionally. The author leaves behind a successful career as an American financial analyst to pursue Ales Debeljak, a womanizing Slovenian poet who catches her attention at a cocktail party. The story begins in New York City, but quickly migrates, along with the author, to Slovenia. As she struggles to forge an identi...
This long, two-part essay raises disturbing questions about our intellectual commitment to the concept of multiculturalism and paints a haunting portrait of a place that no longer exists. The striking photographs show us what remains of a culturally rich and diverse place, where as Debeljak states, the people "until yesterday had lived in a single state, but who today have different countries. The guns of the Balkans have silenced those good vibrations. The stars have set, And of all seasons, the lands south of my own country know but a single one -- the deep, dark winter of death."
'Lost Story,' a novel by gay Slovenian writer Brane Mozetic, translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak (Talisman) . . . [is] presented as the lost diary pages from a young hedonist describing the downward spiraling of his druggy club life. . . . it's given an Eastern Euro twist.
First publication in English of the Slovenian considered his country's best living poet.
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Originally published in 2011, The Mosquito Bite Author is the seventh novel by the acclaimed Turkish author Barış Bıçakçı. It follows the daily life of an aspiring novelist, Cemil, in the months after he submits his manuscript to a publisher in Istanbul. Living in an unremarkable apartment complex in the outskirts of Ankara, Cemil spends his days going on walks, cooking for his wife, repairing leaks in his neighbor’s bathroom, and having elaborate imaginary conversations in his head with his potential editor about the meaning of life and art. Uncertain of whether his manuscript will be accepted, Cemil wavers between thoughtful meditations on the origin of the universe and the trajectory of political literature in Turkey, panic over his own worth as a writer, and incredulity toward the objects that make up his quiet world in the Ankara suburbs.
A diary recounting four decades' worth of sexual exploits, the memoir of a mental institution attendant, and a familiar-looking bicycle dredged out of a river--the discovery of these artifacts sends an archivist on an obsessive quest to discover their owners' identities and fates. Shifting between Slovenia's postcommunist present and its wartime occupation by the Axis, "The Tree with No Name" might well be Drago Jancar's masterpiece: a compelling and universally significant story of an individual confronting the constraints on truth set by his--and every--culture.
"I Saw Her That Night is a tragic love story set amid the atrocities of World War II in Slovenia" --
The Fig Tree is a novel composed of the intertwining stories of the family of Jadran, a 30-something who tries to piece together the story of his relatives to better understand himself. Because he cannot understand why Anja walked out of their shared life, he tries to understand the suspicious death of his grandfather and the withdrawal of his grandmother into oblivion and dementia. With all his might, Jadran tries to understand the departure of his father in the first year of the war in the Balkans as he also tries to understand his mother, with her bewildering resentment of his grandfather, and her silent disappointment with his father. The Fig Tree is a multigenerational family saga, a tour de force spanning three generations from the mid-20th century through the Balkans wars of the 90s until present day. Vojnovic is a master storyteller, and while fateful choices made by his characters are often dictated by the historical realities of the times they live in, at its heart this is an intimate story of family, of relationships, of love and freedom and the choices we make.
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