Slovakian Literature – serie

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.

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."

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.

In an unnamed city shrouded in mist, Valent Kosima is a retiree living quietly yet discontentedly with his doped-up, TV-addicted wife. To escape the claustrophobia of home and city, he masquerades as a man of means and takes to spending his nights strolling through an opulent suburb--but when news comes of a gruesome murder on his new turf, Kosima fears that he may be a suspect. Increasingly anxious and paranoid, Kosima begins to see a mysterious dark-haired girl following him everywhere--and as this succubus takes hold of him, Kosima finds his familiar city becoming indistinguishable from the landscape of his own nightmares. Gripping and provocative, The Succubus begins where the sleek urban world and the dream logic of the unconscious mix... and produce monsters.