Search results for ""Sandorf Passage""

INITIAL COORDINATES meditates on Monika Herceg's earliest childhood memories in a small rural village near Petrinja in central Croatia as war breaks out in the 1990s. It can be read as a magical realist novel in verse, exploring the history of a family through financial hardships, domestic violence, animal abuse, and the overall decline of village life. Drawing directly on Croatian mythology, this bold, unforgettable work mimics oral traditions, reflecting the people whose lives helped shape Herceg's voice and perspective, one very much rooted in the resilience of nature's rhythms.

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When Miroslav Krleža traveled through Russia for six months between the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925, the celebrated Croatian writer was there to figure out what it all meant. The sprawling country was still coming to terms with the events of the 1917 revolution and reeling from Lenin’s death in January 1924. During this period of profound political and social transition, Krleža opened his senses to train stations, cities, and villages and collected wildly different Russian perspectives on their collective moment in history.Krleža’s impressionistic reportage of mass demonstrations and jubilant Orthodox Easter celebrations is informed by his preoccupation with the political, social, and psychological complexities of his environment. The result is a masterfully crafted modernist travelogue that resonates today as much as it did when first published in 1926.

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"Because something is happening, in the distance, approaching from above and below. Weird holes are appearing. I'm often drawn by a void. And that might be the reason I have started to speak." So says the "Scatterwind," the narrator in Robert Perišic's latest novel, A Cat at the Edge of the World . Defying the realms of time and space, the Scatterwind is a knowing presence throughout this story, which spans from the time of ancient Sparta to our contemporary era. Throughout the book, the Scatterwind is drawn to cats, as these animals living on the border of the wild and the domestic, seem to sense the presence that also straddles modes of existence. Perišic's work has long had an uncanny knack for dynamic, richly layered narratives. With A Cat at the Edge of the World, his unique sensitivity for dropping readers into the point of view of both bodiless spirits and animals, Perišic opens a new door into the historical perspective of how human culture developed over the course of thousands of years with this profound novel that will further solidify his reputation as one of the most exciting and important contemporary writers, not only in Croatia, but in all of Europe.

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Neon South is an off-the-beaten-path Latin American travel narrative that unfolds like a novel, shadowing locals all too aware of how outside influences, from colonialism to globalism, have changed their lives. From the drug cartel-controlled squares of Mexico to Venezuelan jungles where the outside world threatens traditions, Marko Pogacar absorbs all he encounters with the eyes and words of a poet, finding humor in the absurd and intimacy in despair. Unexpected similarities surface in the assemblage of these tropical experiences fused together with Pogacar's memories of living through the dissolution of Yugoslavia: “After all, are our customs, our kingdoms, our churches and wars, our arsons and human sacrifices one iota different from the Aztec ones?”

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"In From Nowhere to Nowhere Bekim Sejranovic gives us the elegiac beauties echoing over the vanishing times and places, inviting us to reflect and at the same time to relish funky flashes of memory." ––Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day and Man Booker International Prize finalist Bekim Sejranovic's From Nowhere to Nowhere is a subtle yet unforgettable meditation on the factors that shape identity. The novel's unnamed narrator, raised by his grandparents and scattered to the wind from his hometown of Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, travels to Croatia and Norway, trying to reclaim a sense of self he isn't sure he ever possessed in the first place. From his days playing soccer with friends on Unity Street outside his home to Muslim funerals, his job as an interpreter for Balkan refugees, and his fractious relationships with women, a nomadic aesthetic emerges brilliantly rendering what it means to live a life from which you have always been removed.

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Ivana Bodrožic's In a Sentimental Mood is emotional, but never woeful, deliberate, yet playful poetry capable of reaching both the highest and deepest registers of expression. From abstract jazz-inspired musings to bedroom intimacies, these poems converse with the idea that being alone is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. To lose your dignity and the dignity of your words—that is the worst thing.

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