Search results for ""Author Michael Biggins""

With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young T?rless, and of G?nter Grass's The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipuš's "Young Tjaž," first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age.

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The protagonists of Suzana Tratnik’s short stories all share a sense of isolation on society’s margins. Whether non-participants in the mainstream, rebels against it, or its occasional victims, they’re well practiced at recognizing the herd instinct in action. From the six-year-old girl who discovers transgressive new games to play with her glamorous cousin from England; to a decidedly unusual schoolchild inventing a novel way of getting back at playground bullies; to young women who find their love interests drifting away, seduced by conventional notions of popularity and success; to a narrator who suddenly finds herself on no ordinary train trip through the heart of Slovenia-these are characters and stories that deftly and sardonically underscore the phantom nature of “normalcy” itself and the risks of its tyranny for dissenters and conformists alike.

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Designed as a historical novel, The Masochist forges an intimate portrait of a young, tenacious woman who, in uncertain times at the end of the 19th century, chose an uncertain path - the only path that could lead her to freedom. On Christmas Eve 1874, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whom history would remember as the most famous masochist, left his home in Bruck an der Mur in Austria for the unknown. The novel surmises he didn't come back alone, but brought with him a new family member: a tiny red-haired girl he found in the forests around Lemberg/ Lviv. The Masochist is the memoir of Nadezhda Moser, the woman this little girl becomes, a fictional character who forces her way among the historical figures of the time.

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Boris Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau, and Natzweiler. His fellow prisoners comprised a veritable microcosm of Europe Italians, French, Russians, Dutch, Poles, Germans. Twenty years later, when he visits a camp in the Vosges Mountains that has been preserved as a historical monument, images of his experiences come back to him: corpses being carried to the ovens; emaciated prisoners in wooden clogs and ragged, zebra-striped uniforms, struggling up the steps of a quarry or standing at roll call in the cold rain; the infirmary, reeking of dysentery and death. Necropolis is Pahor s stirring account of his attempts to provide medical aid to prisoners in the face of the utter brutality of the camps and of his coming to terms with the ineradicable guilt he feels, having survived when millions did not.

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Young protagonist Bubi is a perpetual outsider - exiled from Switzerland in 1938, his family returns home to Ljubljana, where their half-German background makes them stick out in local society. Reeling from the loss of his home in Switzerland, and surrounded by a language he can t quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny naivete, the novel flits between memories of tenderness and shocking violence as Bubi navigates friendship, family, and his burgeoning sexuality in a land under hostile occupation.

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A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, "The Master of Insomnia" is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the 'big picture' will inevitably overlook the essential... [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."

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Boris Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Bergen-Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau and Natzweiler-Struthof. Twenty years later, as he visited the preserved remains of a camp, his experiences came back to him: the emaciated prisoners; the ragged, zebra-striped uniforms; the infirmary reeking of dysentery and death.Necropolis is Pahor's stirring account of providing medical aid to prisoners in the face of the utter brutality of the camps - and coming to terms with the guilt of surviving when millions did not. It is a classic account of the Holocaust and a powerful act of remembrance.

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