At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is “write a book about light.” The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific l
Finalist for the NBCC award for Criticism.Whether it's commentary on jaded youth, the ways technology has made us soft in the head, or how wrestling a hotel minibar into a bathtub is the best way to s
The work of this “eminent, still-wild spirit of Central Europe” (Publishers Weekly) continues to electrify. In The Blue Tower, language is remade with tenderness and abandon: “Rommel was kissing heave
The work of Mehmedalija "Mak" Dizdar (1917-71) is the cornerstone of modern Bosnian literature. During the Second World War he was a member of the anti-fascist Partisans. After the war, he became prom
A bloody, atmospheric modern classic of crime literature and one of the most haunting and terrifying thrillers to come out of Europe in recent years?Written in the spirit of the sensational murder sto
Andrzej Stasiuk is a restless and indefatigable traveler. His journeys take him from his native Poland to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. By car, train, bus, ferry
One of the most gifted poets of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a contemporary classic. Few writers in poetry or prose have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that are the tradem
A clerk at the State Bank begins to notice that something strange is going on and money is disappearing. Meanwhile, he gets a couple guinea pigs, and at night, our hero begins to conduct experiments w
Set in the Croatian city of Zagreb, then a part of Yugoslavia, in the period between the world wars Ruta Tannenbaum’s central character is an ingenue inspired by the real-life figure Lea Deutsch, the
The place is Serbia, the time is the late 1990s. Our protagonist, a single man, writes a regular op-ed column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking pot
The nineteenth-century founding of “free settlements” in the Americas serves as a starting point for the new novel by popular Czech author Patrik Ourednik. Simultaneously satiric and philosophical, Th
Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal's rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking
"These poems move mysteriously by means of a profound inner concentration, giving expression to the deepest laws of the mind. Their linguistic 'making' is informed by vivid evidence of a serious self-
"These vivid portraits and memoirs, these intimacies rescued from oblivion, tie us more closely to one of the great poets and spiritual presences of the twentieth century. An Invisible Rope is an indi
Gaps begins with Hrabal receiving the long anticipated advance copy of his first short story collection, Perlicka na dne (Pearl of the Deep). Hrabal's career as a successful writer starts here, and th
This staggering volume by a leading poet of Eastern Europe, acclaimed both at home and abroad, includes the entirety of Debeljak's two most recent collections, Unended and Under the Waterline (availa
One of the world's first bestsellers, this historical novel contrasts the decadence of ancient Roman society with the simplicity and spiritual power of the earliest Christians. An epic tale of the rom
In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bozena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects—pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, k
