Writings from an Unbound Europe – serie

Winner of the 1993 Baltic Assembly PrizeAn immediate sensation upon its 1993 publication in Europe, already translated into more than a dozen languages, Border State is a brilliantly realized account of a man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by a world that is subsuming his own and inhabiting a West in which "all countries have become imaginary deserts of ruins where crowds of nomads roam from one attraction to the other." His tale, in which disillusion and murder become inextricably linked, is a compelling exploration of scarcity, longing, and madness.

The Fortress is one of the most significant and fascinating novels to come out of the former Yugoslavia. Ahmet Shabo returns home to eighteenth-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 these qualities.

David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed largely outside the canon of Serbian literature, have influenced a generation of Balkan writers. This collection gathers Albahari's best and most important stories, moving from an early preoccupation with the family and Central European culture to metafictional searches for the roots of his identity.

In these two novellas, Volodymyr Dibrova tells the story of how the Soviet system was sustained by individuals who never truly believed in it, but simply lacked the courage to oppose it.Peltse portrays the formation of an average apparatchik. Both funny and alarming, it provides a psychological portrait of an individual trapped in a system he simultaneously dislikes and depends upon for survival. Pentameron tells the story of one day in the life of five colleagues at a Soviet research institute. Each is dissatisfied, yet all are trapped in and by a system that has taken away their ability to act decisively.

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 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.

Although the city in the title of this collection refers to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, the text serves as a universal geography of the contemporary soul in an urban context, built on the fragments of the past. The poems search for personal and historical meaning within the context of time.

David Albahari is one of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His serious, understated explorations of the self have influenced many writers of his native land's younger generation. The narrator of Bait has just exiled himself to Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the death of his mother. As he listens to a series of audio tapes recorded by his mother years before, the narrator ponders her life and their relationship while simultaneously trying to come to terms with a new life of his own - one of exile and the confusion of a new language and culture. Bait is an exquisitely crafted novel that exhibits the wit and raw honesty Albahari's readers have long admired.

The tale of a poet's tragicomic last days in Venica; What was the fate of Stanislav Perfetsky - poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Certain evidence points to suicide. But some whisper murder. Some suggest the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. It may be related to the religious cult ceremony he unluckily happened upon in Munich...or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older women. Or, then again, it may not. Perverzion reconstructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman (for example, he plays countless musical instruments so well he collaborated with Elton John during the star's secret sojourn in Ukraine), is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from its absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus, descending into the sophisticated decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate. A work of sly, subversive humor and fantastic wordplay, Perverzion is a look into the new Ukraine's post-Soviet literary culture by one of the country's fore-most contemporary writers.

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 for one day, Shehu's novel blends the autobiographical and the historical, the personal and the political into a powerful tale - a story that conveys the terrors, small and large, of a totalitarian state while capturing all that is surreal and even lyrical in life in such a deeply distorted world.

In this pair of short novels. Arnost 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 by what he has witnessed and by the knowledge that luck - not skill, not courage, certainly not goodness - separated the survivors from the doomed. He seeks solace remembering the women he's loved or desired, even the one who represents his death. In Porgess, the narrator recounts the life of the title character, ""the most handsome boy in Jewish Prague"" who was paralyzed on the last day of World War II. The two discuss their mutual fascinations - women, jazz, the significance of numbers - in sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic voices, but always with the specters of the dead and the guilt of survival close at hand.

In this pair of short novels. Arnost 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 by what he has witnessed and by the knowledge that luck - not skill, not courage, certainly not goodness - separated the survivors from the doomed. He seeks solace remembering the women he's loved or desired, even the one who represents his death. In Porgess, the narrator recounts the life of the title character, ""the most handsome boy in Jewish Prague"" who was paralyzed on the last day of World War II. The two discuss their mutual fascinations - women, jazz, the significance of numbers - in sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic voices, but always with the specters of the dead and the guilt of survival close at hand.

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 encounter work that reflects the literary paradox of Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century: the startling originality of the new uneasily coupled with the strains of history; the sophistication and self-consciousness of late (or post-) modernity married to the simplicity of a literature first finding its voice; a refusal of political influence and pressure expressed through frankly political subject matter. Albania's more established writers (including Dritero Agolli, Ismail Kadare, Teodor Laco, and Eqrem Basha) appear here alongside newer talents (such as Ylljet Alicka, Mimoza Ahmeti, Elivra Dones, Lindita Arapi, and Kim Mehmeti), providing English-speaking readers with an elucidating and entertaining overview of the recent history, and the future, of the nation's literature.

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 writer whose style has been described as ""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work ""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.

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 writer whose style has been described as ""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work ""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.

Petra Hulova became an overnight sensation when ""All This Belongs to Me"" was originally published in Czech in 2002, when the author was just twenty-three years old. She has since established herself as one of the most exciting young novelists in Europe today. ""Writings from an Unbound Europe"" is proud to publish the first translation of her work in English. ""All This Belongs to Me"" chronicles the lives of three generations of women in a Mongolian family. Told from the point of view of a mother, three sisters, and the daughter of one of the sisters, this story of secrets and betrayals takes us from the daily rhythms of nomadic life on the steppe to the harsh realities of urban alcoholism and prostitution in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. ""All This Belongs to Me"" is a sweeping family saga that showcases Hulova's genius.

Vita Nuova is the second in a trilogy of memoirs written from the perspective of Bohumil Hrabal's wife, Eliska, about their life in Prague from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Communist repression of artists was at its peak. Hrabal's inimitable humor, which in Eliska's ruminations ranges from bawdy slapstick to cutting irony, is all the more penetrating for being directed at himself. ""Vita Nuova"" showcases Hrabal's legendary bohemian intellectual life, particularly his relationship with Vladimir Boudnik. Hrabal creates a shrewd, lively portrait of Eastern European intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century.

Jaan Kross's historical novel Sailing Against the Wind fictionalizes the life of Bernhard Schmidt (1879-1935), an Estonian-born inventor. It is a meditation on national identity, the relationship between history and the individual life, and the mechanisms of the historical novel as a genre.