Bora Cosic's My Family's Role in the World Revolution enjoyed a successful run as a play, but the film version was closed immediately and ultimately caused Cosic's publications to be for over four years.
During the German occupation of Belgrade, a family--including an alarmist mother, an eternally drunk father, two young aunts who swoon over American movie stars, and a playboy uncle--attempt to find any kind of work they can do at home. When the postwar Socialist society is being ushered in after the war, the narrator becomes the slogan-spouting ideological leader of the household,...

This novel, set in the 1970s, tells the story of the "author," a middle-aged Polish professor who lives abroad but who earlier survived the Nazi concentration camps, and Rudolf, an old man. Told in stream of consciousness as well as through a triangular correspondence among Rudolf, the author, and the author's mother, the story emerges as a tale of subversion and liberation that echoes Gombrowicz in its exploration of transgressive desire. It will be of great interest to those interested in Polish literature and to readers of gay and lesbian literature.

Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and daughter, David Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together to create a multilayered narrative combining a wholly fictional novel with a chronicle of the narrator's visit to the United States. As the fragments accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness.

Winner, 1998 PEN Center USA West Award for Translation
Josef Hirsal's experimental novel is a Dada-like romp through the life of a young man born into a Bohemian peasant family. Told in five parts, "A Bohemian Youth" begins with a word to the wise, moves on to the text, continues with notes and with notes to the note, and ends with a note on the notes to the notes.
More than just a tongue-in-cheek parody of a literary memoir, "A Bohemian Youth" is a glimpse of the First Czechoslovak Republic as seen through the eyes of a young peasant from the provinces. Abounding in intimate...

Winner of the Ksaver Sandor Gjalski Prize

These are the first two volumes of the Croatian poet and novelist Irena Vrkljan's lyrical autobiography. Although each novel illuminates the other, they also stand alone as original and independent works of art. In The Silk, the Shears, Vrkljan traces the symbolic and moral significance of her life, and her vision of the fate of women in her mother's time and in her own. Marina continues the intense analysis of the poetic self, using the life of Marina Tsvetaeva to meditate on the processes behind biography.

The novella and two short stories that make up this volume were written at three different periods in Makanin's life, yet they are united by their narrative and stylistic invention, their range of human emotion, and the profound humanity of their prose. Though banished and suppressed in the Brezhnev era, Makanin is now recognized as one of Russia's leading writers.
In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the...

The poems in "Angel Riding a Beast" are the stunning expression of the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's years in America. The sadness and paradoxes of exile and the clarity of a cross-cultural awareness become for Ursu the psychological and descriptive framework for poems infused with the emotion and images of erotic longing and spiritual loneliness. The combination of elegy and wit in the poems of Ovid, the poet of exile with whom Ursu claims kinship, is evident in her poetry as well. Always conscious of both her new American freedom and the remorselessness of time and death, Ursu explores the...

The Fortress is one of the most significant and fascinating novels to come out of the former Yugoslavia. Published as Tvrdava in Serbian, it is the tenth and among the best-known novels by Mesa Selimovic (1910-1982). In the novel, Ahmet Shabo returns home to seventeenth-century Sarajevo from the war in Russia, numbed by the death in battle or suicide of nearly his entire military unit. In time he overcomes the anguish of war, only to find that he has emerged a reflective and contemplative man in a society that does not value, and will not tolerate, the subversive implications of...

Francesco Koslovic--even his name straddles two cultures. And during the spring of 1955, in the village of Materada on the Istrian Peninsula, his two worlds are coming apart. Materada, the first volume of Fulvio Tomizza's celebrated Istrian Trilogy, depicts the Istrian exodus of the hundreds of thousands who had once thrived in a rich ethnic mixture of Italians and Slavs. Complicating Koslovic's own departure is his attempt to keep the land that he and his brother have worked all their lives.

A picture of a disappearing way of life, a tale of feud and displacement, and imbued with...