Readings from the Heart of Europe

"Inventive, funny and moving. . . . Damion Searls’s translation does justice to Stanišic’s dry wit and linguistic playfulness, and captures the tense undercurrents building throughout the book". —The New York Times Book Review

Winner of the 2019 German Book Prize 

About the Author: Saša Stanišic was born in Višegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into thirty-one languages; Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

“Karastoyanov’s novel is set in Bulgaria in the 1920s, but also invokes the spirit of John Lennon, and brings to mind Dostoevsky’s Demons with its anarchists and assassins, lighthouses, zeppelins, and synthesis of modernist narrative techniques and Balkan storytelling.” 
—Berliner Zeitung

Winner of the 2014 Helikon Award for Bulgarian Novel of the Year Prize 

About the Author: Hristo Karastoyanov is a multi-award winning contemporary Bulgarian novelist, playwright, and political essayist whose work has been translated into English, Turkish, and German. All seven of his novels have been shortlisted for the prestigious Helikon Award.

Our March reading honors the work of one of Ukraine’s most successful novelists and poets, Serhiy Zhadan. 

Buy the book here.

The Orphanage (Internat), originally published in 2017, is Zhadan's highly acclaimed war novel, depicting life in an unspecified frontline region in the early periods of the war in Donbas, telling the story of ordinary lives during the most dangerous days in Europe’s recent history. 

Chosen as one of “Six Books to Read for Context on Ukraine” by the New York Times 

Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the “20 Best Books of 2021”

“A nightmarish, raw vision of contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet’s sense of lyricism . . . [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country’s devastation and its people’s passionate determination to survive.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Join us to discuss Soviet Milk written by Nora Ikstena and translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis, Peirene Press, 2019.

Buy the book here.

Buy the book here: 
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Spoke-Snakish/dp/0802124127/

About the book:
A best seller in the author's native country of Estonia, where the book is so well known that a popular board game has been created based on it, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is the imaginative and moving story of a boy who is tasked with preserving ancient traditions in the face of modernity.

Set in a fantastical version of medieval Estonia, The Man Who Spoke Snakish follows a young boy, Leemet, who lives with his hunter-gatherer family in the forest and is the last speaker of the ancient tongue of snakish, a language that allows its speakers to command all animals. But the forest is gradually emptying as more and more people leave to settle in villages, where they break their backs tilling the land to grow wheat for their "bread" (which Leemet has been told tastes horrible) and where they pray to a god very different from the spirits worshipped in the forest's sacred grove.

With lothario bears who wordlessly seduce women, a giant louse with a penchant for swimming, a legendary flying frog, and a young charismatic viper named Ints, The Man Who Spoke Snakish is a totally inventive novel for listeners of David Mitchell, Sjón, and Terry Pratchett.

Join us for our December reading, When the Birches Leaf Out Up There by Breda Smolnikar.

Join us for our November reading, White Shroud by Antanas Škėma.

Widely acclaimed as Lithuania's great modernist novel, White Shroud by Antanas Škėma will be our book for discussion on Sunday, November 7, at 5:00pm Pacific time over Zoom, with our special guest Prof Violeta Kelertas (U. of Illinois-Chicago), one of America's leading experts on Lithuanian literature.

E-book and print editions are available at Amazon.  

Or direct from the publisher, Vagabond Voices in Scotland.

Our next discussion will feature the novel "A Spare Life" by the Macedonian writer Lidija Dimkovska (published in Macedonian 2012; in English 2016). We are very pleased to announce that the author, Dimkovska, and the novel's translator, Christina E. Kramer, will attend as special guests.

You can purchase "A Spare Life" on Amazon

Please note the time for this two-hour online event:
10am-12pm- Pacific Time Zone
7:00pm-9:00pm- if you're logging in from a Central European Time Zone.

About the author:
Poet, novelist, and translator Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In her native language she has published six books of poetry, three novels, and one American diary, and has edited three anthologies. Her books have been translated in more than fifteen languages. She has participated in numerous international literary festivals and has been a writer-in-residence in London, Berlin, Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, Krems, Tirana, and Split. Since 2017 she has been president of the jury for Slovenia’s Vilenica International Literary Prize. The American Poetry Review featured her work in a special supplement in 2003. In 2005 she attended the International Writing Program in Iowa, and Ugly Duckling Press published her first collection of poetry in English, Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers, in 2006. in 2012 Copper Canyon Press published her second book of poetry pH Neutral History, which was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award, and in 2016 Two Lines Press published her novel A Spare Life, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. Dimkovska’s translator, Christina E. Kramer, has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for her third novel, Grandma Non-Oui.

About the translator:
Christina E. Kramer is a professor emerita at the University of Toronto, Canada. She has published numerous articles relating to Balkan linguistics and Macedonian grammar (Univ. of Wisconsin Press). She has translated a number of novels, including A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska, Freud's Sister by Goce Smilevski, and three novels by Luan Starova My Father's Books, The Time of the Goats and The Path of the Eels. Her translation of Fear of Barbarians, by Petar Andonovski, will be published in August 2021.

Join us for our May reading, The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht.

Once you register by filling out this form - you will receive a zoom link that will allow you access to all our meetings.
You can get the book HERE. 

About the novel:
“Spectacular . . . [Téa Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop.”—Entertainment Weekly 

"Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker’s twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation." (Amazon)

Read more about the book Here.

About the author: 
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many others. She was the recipient of the Rona Jaffe fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She splits time between Wyoming and Texas, and currently serves as the Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos. 

Join us for our April reading, Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadare from Albania.

You can get the book HERE. 

About the novel:
"Masterful in its simplicity, Chronicle in Stone is a touching coming-of-age story and a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy’s eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty—as well as the simple pleasures of life.

Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things, but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy’s story are tantalizing fragments of the city’s history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges." (Amazon)

Read more about the author at this link. 

Once you register by filling out this form - you will receive a zoom link that will allow you access to all our meetings:
https://forms.gle/oJgxYmbFkpQoF9aa8

Get the book on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Darusya-Tale.../dp/1947980939

About the novel:

"Matios’s novel Sweet Darusya, initially published in Ukraine in 2003, has been read, studied, researched, and written about worldwide—mostly in academic circles. The question remains, however, why it took over a decade for its English translation to appear. In my opinion, not only the complexity of the text made it a daunting task for a skilled translator to undertake but also the challenge of communicating in another language a deeply seeded trauma of Ukraine and its people, masterfully portrayed by Matios." Natalia Cousineau, World Literature Today

About our special guests:

Michael Naydan
He is Woskob Family Professor of Ukrainian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and works primarily in the fields of Ukrainian and Russian literature and literary translation. He received his BA and MA degrees from The American University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has published over 50 articles on literary topics and more than 80 translations in journals and anthologies. Of his more than 40 books of published and edited translations, some of his most recent include Nikolai Gumilev’s Africa (Glagoslav Publishers, 2018); Yuri Andrukhovych’s cultural and literary essays, My Final Territory: Selected Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2018); and Abram Terz’s literary essays, Strolls with Pushkin and Journey to the River Black (Columbia University Press, 2016). In 2017 he published his literary essays in Ukrainian translation in the volume, From Gogol to Andrukhovych: Selected Literary Essays (Piramida Publishers). He has also published a novel about the city of Lviv Seven Signs of the Lion (Glagoslav Publishers, 2016), which also appeared in 2017 in Marianna Prokopovych’s Ukrainian translation under the title Sim znakiv leva (Piramida Publishers). He has received numerous prizes for his translations including the George S.N. Luckyj Award in Ukrainian Literature Translation from the Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies in 2013.

Olha Tytarenko
She received her BA and MA in English from Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Ukraine, her MA from The Pennsylvania State University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto with a specialty in Russian literature. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice of Russian at the University of Nebraska. With Michael Naydan she has co-translated Iren Rozdobudko’s novel The Lost Button (Glagoslav Publishers), Abram Terz’s Strolls with Pushkin and Journey to the River Black (Columbia University Press), Maria Matios’ novel Sweet Darusya: A Tale of Two Villages, and Yuri Vynnychuk’s novel Tango of Death (the latter two with Spuyten Duyvil).

Join us for another engaging discussion of Eastern and Central European literature! We will talk about Magdalena Tulli's book "Dreams and Stones" with our special guest, translator Bill Johnston. 

About the book:
"Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli’s hands myth, metaphor, history, and narrative are combined to magical effect. Dreams and Stones is about the growth of a city, and also about all cities; at the same time it is not about cities at all, but about how worlds are created, trans- formed, and lost through words alone. A stunning debut by one of Europe’s finest new writers." (goodreads)

About the translator:
https://archipelagobooks.org/book_translator/johnston-bill/

You can find the book here. 

OR on Amazon. 

On August 30, at 11 a.m.PDT we’ll share our impressions of Blinding, by Mircea Cărtărescu, and joined by the book translator Sean Cotter.

Sean Cotter's translation of Cărtărescu's Blinding was a finalist for The Best Translated Book Award in 2014. 

https://messybooker.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/blinding-mircea-cartarescu-translated-by-sean-cotter-best-translated-book-award-2014/

The book is available as an e-book from the publisher directly:
https://archipelagobooks.org/book/blinding-book-one/

Or from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Blinding-Mircea-Cartarescu/dp/193574484

You can get the book in different formats from Archipelago Books: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/newcomers-book-two/

Or from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Newcomers-Book-Two-Lojze-Kovacic/dp/193981040X/ref=sr_1_8?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Biggins&qid=1597011540&s=books&sr=1-8

"In this second part of the famous Slovenian writer’s autobiographical novel, the narrator details the dangers and humiliations of his boyhood living in occupied Slovenia in the Second World War. The second part of Lojze Kovačič’s autobiographical novel, considered by some to be the most important Slovenian novel of the 20th century, describes his half-German family’s life in Ljubljana during the Second World War. The young protagonist Bubi is a perpetual outsider – exiled from Switzerland in 1938, his family returns home to Ljubljana, where their half-German background makes them stick out in local society. Reeling from the loss of his home in Switzerland, and surrounded by a language he can’t quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny naïveté, the novel flits between memories of tenderness and shocking violence as Bubi navigates friendship, family, and his burgeoning sexuality in a land under hostile occupation." (Archipelago Books)
 

You can get the book in different formats from Archipelago Books: https://archipelagobooks.org/book/newcomers-book-two/

Or from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Newcomers-Book-Two-Lojze-Kovacic/dp/193981040X/ref=sr_1_8?dchild=1&keywords=Michael+Biggins&qid=1597011540&s=books&sr=1-8

"In this second part of the famous Slovenian writer’s autobiographical novel, the narrator details the dangers and humiliations of his boyhood living in occupied Slovenia in the Second World War. The second part of Lojze Kovačič’s autobiographical novel, considered by some to be the most important Slovenian novel of the 20th century, describes his half-German family’s life in Ljubljana during the Second World War. The young protagonist Bubi is a perpetual outsider – exiled from Switzerland in 1938, his family returns home to Ljubljana, where their half-German background makes them stick out in local society. Reeling from the loss of his home in Switzerland, and surrounded by a language he can’t quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny naïveté, the novel flits between memories of tenderness and shocking violence as Bubi navigates friendship, family, and his burgeoning sexuality in a land under hostile occupation." (Archipelago Books)
 

You are cordially invited to join us for our second meeting of the new year, on February 8! We will read The Land of Green Plums, by Nobel laureate Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

You can find the book on Amazon or at your local store: https://www.amazon.com/Land-Green-Plums-Novel/