Anzhelina Polonskaya is considered one of the freshest voices among young Russian poets. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was not educated in the classic literary tradition, nor nurtured by the well-known Moscow and Petersburg journals. This has freed her from self-consciously struggling under the weight of her country's literary tradition, and her independent, even idiosyncratic, voice informs poems filled with sharp images, acute observations, and both the pains and joys of personal experience. Drawn from her most recent Russian collections, "A Voice: Selected Poems "explores the...
Anzhelina Polonskaya is considered one of the freshest voices among young Russian poets. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was not educated in th...
In a remote Albanian village, a place of banishment, a stranger appears, claiming to be Viktor Dragoti and looking for his long-lost love. That Viktor Dragoti has been dead for nine years, killed by the Albanian coast guard while trying to swim to freedom, only adds to the stranger's mystery - and to the suspense of this curiously real and yet otherworldly work by one of Albania's most distinguished writers. With echoes of "The Return of Martin Guerre" and Kafka's "The Trial", with allusions to "The Odyssey" and the Albanian folktale of Ago Ymeri, a legendary hero released from the underworld...
In a remote Albanian village, a place of banishment, a stranger appears, claiming to be Viktor Dragoti and looking for his long-lost love. That Viktor...
Contemplations of survival by one of the leading Czech writers of the twentieth century It occurred to me why I was able to forgive the Italians, but never the Germans. Was it because the Italians never slept on mattresses stuffed with the hair of Luster Leibling or Weltfeind Flusser? In this pair of short novels, Arno t Lustig continues his lifelong project of creating a universe-at once concrete and dreamlike-to examine the horrors of the Holocaust and the impossible burden of living as a survivor. The Abyss is the fragmented memories of David Wiesenthal, aged twenty, tortured...
Contemplations of survival by one of the leading Czech writers of the twentieth century It occurred to me why I was able to forgive the Italians, ...
A comic novel of war from a teenager's point-of-view Published as the siege of Sarajevo ended, Lodgers is a hilarious, unsentimental report from the front lines of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Detergent mixed with flour, museum relics sold to U.N. peacekeepers, the magic power of laminated accreditation-all of the folly and the horror of that time are revealed in the sarcastic report of the novel's teenage would-be authoress. Maja lives in the basement of a Sarajevo museum, enduring with equal annoyance Serb artillery and vegetarian meals that taste like fried sponge. Her father, the...
A comic novel of war from a teenager's point-of-view Published as the siege of Sarajevo ended, Lodgers is a hilarious, unsentimental report from t...
The events of 1989 that brought an end to the so-called East Bloc may have increased women's opportunities to write and publish, or at least changed the circumstances under which they do so. Still writing from a certain historical and cultural margin, these women from East Central Europe have begun to explore a new freedom whose fruits are displayed to exhilarating effect in this book-a freedom to experiment, to innovate, to create a literature uniquely expressive of their world. This volume for the first time allows English-speaking readers to discover the pleasures of these women's writing....
The events of 1989 that brought an end to the so-called East Bloc may have increased women's opportunities to write and publish, or at least changed t...
Although Albanian literature dates back to the 1500s, creative prose in that nation is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon; and much as the early literature in Albanian was interrupted by Ottoman rule--and oppression--its later emergence was stymied and stunted by Stalinist politics and propaganda. What this volume documents is, then, a literature at once venerable and nascent, a tradition in the making, however deep its roots. In these stories representing the last three decades of Albanian writing--especially the burst of creativity in the newfound freedom of the 1990s--readers will...
Although Albanian literature dates back to the 1500s, creative prose in that nation is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon; and much as the early...
Inspired by Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoevsky, whose biographies about their husbands have now been published in Prague, Bohumil Hrabal decided to produce his own autobiographical work, ostensibly fiction, from his wife s point of view. He would write, he said, not a putdown about myself, but a little bit of how it all was, that marriage of ours, with myself as a jewel and adornment of our life together. The task, taken up by such a rogue comic talent, could be nothing other than strangely delightful; and in "In-House Weddings," the first of the trilogy that Hrabal produced, we meet the...
Inspired by Mrs. Tolstoy and Mrs. Dostoevsky, whose biographies about their husbands have now been published in Prague, Bohumil Hrabal decided to prod...
Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic experience of a...
Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-commun...
In Tworki, a village just southwest of Warsaw, there is a psychiatric hospital and in that hospital, the patients and their caretakers are hidden from the war just outside their iron gates. Our hero, Jurek, answers an ad in the paper for a job there and finds himself keeping the books alongside a knockout strawberry blonde named Sonia. They and their group of friends vital young people like Marcel, an initial rival for Jurek; Olek, Sonia s chosen love; and Janka, with whom Jurek becomes involved do their jobs, picnic on the weekends, and dance in the gardens on the grounds of the...
In Tworki, a village just southwest of Warsaw, there is a psychiatric hospital and in that hospital, the patients and their caretakers are hidden f...
