You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Partly parables, partly fairy tales, You Do Understand is a comedy of errors for a species of talkers who’ve never learned to listen. This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching, and yet always generous short-short fictions addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understand what we want and need. Demonstrating that language and intimacy are as much barriers between human beings as ways of connecting them, Andrej Blatnik here provides us with a guided tour of the slips, misunderstandings, and blind alleys we each manage to fall foul of on a daily basis—no closer to understanding the motives of our families, friends, lovers, or coworkers than we are those of a complete stranger . . . or, indeed, our own.
As an Iranian Muslim woman and a granddaughter of a well-known ayatollah, Shahla Haeri was accepted into the communities where she conducted her fieldwork on mut’a, temporary marriage. Mut’a is legally sanctioned among the Twelver Shi’ites who live predominantly in Iran. Drawing on rich interviews that would have been denied a Western anthropologist, the author describes the concept of a temporary-marriage contract, in which a man and an unmarried woman (virgin, widow, or divorcee) decide how long they want to stay married to each other (from one hour to ninety-nine years) and how much money is to be given to the temporary wife. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, the regime has cond...
With a per capita publishing rate of more that three times that of the United States, Slovenia has a long and storied literary history, from the legendary 9th-century Freising Manuscripts to postmodern masterpieces by Igor Bratoz. Continuing that tradition, Angels Beneath the Surface, the first collection of Slovene fiction to be published in English outside of Slovenia since 1994, offers a rich sampling of Slovene short stories. The thirteen tales here represent a wide array of voices and writing styles among the country's renowned–and emergent–writers. Written between 1990 and 2005, the selections in Angels Beneath the Surface together comprise a vivid snapshot of Slovene literary consciousness at the turn of the millennium. These authors mine their culture for often startling insights in stories that range from wicked variations on fairy tales to dour romances to skewerings of the bureaucratic state. Recent articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other prominent publications attest to renewed interest in European literature in translation, and this collection is an incisive entry in the genre.
"Andrej Blatnik's ambitious novel tells the story of a man's determination to radically change himself and to alter the world that has embraced globalization as the God of the future"--
The Book Is Alive is a survey of current thinking and innovative practice in contemporary publishing based on papers presented at the Booklive international symposium in London in June 2012. This event brought together theorists and practitioners from the world of publishing and artists' books to examine the current transformation of the book and its ability to keep apace with digital culture and the emergence of new modes of making, reading, collecting and disseminating "on-the-page" work. It includes an interview with conceptual artist Joan Fontcuberta, a keynote text by Artbook - D.A.P. President Sharon Gallagher and writings by Andrej Blatnik, Sarah Bodman, Marco Bohr, Daniela Cascella, Arnaud Desjardin, Annabel Frearson, Peter Jaeger, Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Mignell, Sharon Kirland and Nick Thurston, Didier Mathieu, Paul Soulellis and Stefan Szczelkun.
This concise book by the well-known Serbian writer and literary researcher summarizes his decade-long experience of teaching creative writing at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Always offering attendees four good reasons for not attending his course, or, in a broader perspective, discouraging them from professional writing altogether, the author reflects ultimately on what it really takes to become a writer of literary fiction. This essay, which makes up the first part of this work, is complemented by a selection of witty short stories, forming the second part, and which have been used as templates in the teaching context.
Businessman Yuki Yajima is fifty-one years old. He and his wife, Asako, are the parents of two daughters: Ryo, seventeen, and Yuka, an infant of only two months. Asking himself why he's allowed himself to become a father again at his age, Yuki begins to remember his uncle, who died quite young--younger, indeed, than Yuki is now. Thinking of this man, whom the young Yuki idolized, and who first introduced the boy to authors like Kenzaburo Oe and the Marquis de Sade, serves as a strange tipping point: allowing a sense of chaos and complexity back into his otherwise well-heeled life. A rare work of fiction focused simply on a man of integrity--a dying breed, in novels--"The Shadow of a Blue Cat" meticulously renders his life and opinions as Yuki tries to find a middle path between the radicalism of his uncle's life and the quiet bourgeois home he's worked so hard to build.
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.
In the tradition of Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Georges Perec’s Je me souviens, this delightful “novel” offers a thousand answers to the question, “What are you thinking?” (Or, as translator Ian Monk puts it: “Penny for them?”) The answers are spontaneous, revealing, ominous, insignificant, grotesque, amusing, lecherous, tragic and trivial by turns, and lovable in their cheerful imperfection. This is a book about the basics: love, sexuality, death, and all the other things that lurk in our everyday thoughts.
What do we mean by Europe? Thirty-three renowned authors from 33 European countries attempt an answer -- in serious, ironic, skeptical, or optimistic tones. Their essays, written for the symposium held at the Literaturhaus Hamburg in 2003, reflect the astonishing diversity of European cultures. Not only are the style and experience of the individual authors remarkable for their distinctiveness, but their perspectives and views also appear to have little in common -- at first glance.