A Hounted House
13,00 €A collection of short stories by Virgina Woolf, first time in Croatian translation.
Translated by Sanja Lovrenčić
Kikop Award for the best literary translation in 2012.
All My Loved Ones But Me
13,00 €Luka Mavretić’s third poetry collection “All My Loved Ones But Me” is a series of “inner journeys” – journeys that the author announces in the first poems of this very thoughtfully built piece. The young poet balances between lyrical verses and prosaic sentences, he strives towards a refined simplicity and manages to create a conversational tone, which is an important building block of his poetical world. An abundance of motives and a diary-like directness make this book an interesting and fresh collection. Even though he uses interpunction which creates finished, harmonical sentences and gives the text a prosaic tone, his verses remain verses, lines with a natural and easy flow. Despite a breezy atmosphere that the author creates, this is a collection of well thought-through and refined texts – Luka Mavretić is a poet who, in an alchemy of words, transforms chosen glimpses of reality into memorable and luminous images.
Around Ogorje
15,00 €In Zvjezdana Jembrih’s third poetry collection all the potentials of her writing merge and come to full expression. Inspired by the specific space, a village in the Split hinterland, the author creates a series of impressive records, reaching a rare level of literary quality. Details from the chosen environment become triggers for surprising images in which the near and the far, the real and the unreal mix, with not even a shadow of sentimentality or commonplace thinking. The poems gathered in this book were created over several years, by slow distillation of the essentials. The result of this process captivates with the range of poetic imagination, the purity and consistency of the concept, the harmonious blending of direct observation, unobtrusive erudition and the ability to translate into a unique language the emotions stirred by different aspects of a (neglected) landscape and its inhabitants.
Chopin
17,00 €A book on Frederic Chopin written by his colleague and friend Franz Liszt. Croatian translation of the first French edition. Preface by pianist Veljko Glodić, professor at the Music Academy in Zagreb.
Dormitory
14,00 €Although it could seem that the primary origin of this poetry is the world of words – the author recurrently affirms the experience of reading as something very much alive and inspiring – the contact with her own material environment is equally important for Lidija Dujić. And no matter how linguistically complex, surprising, metaphorical this poetry is, and how far it takes (ironic) distance from reality, it always remains tied to the real moment that triggered poetic imagination and caused poetic language to flow. Singling out some moments, turning flashes of reality into a thoughtful linguistic structure, the poet creates original and meditative images, with a clear awareness of poetry as non-ordinary speech.
Feminine Side of the Croatian Literature
14,00 €Exploring the feminine side of Croatian literature Lidija Dujić offers a concise and interesting overview of selected segment of the Croatian literary history. She gives biographial sketches of Croatian female writers, explores the reception of their work and cliche images of women writers from the times of Renaissance to the contemporary age. Analyzing and re-valuing some works, recognized under the label of “women’s literature”, the author challenges many commonplace notions – writing in first person singular. The book is based on her doctoral dissertation, but is intended for a wider audience.
Flush: a Biography
13,00 €How would a dog perceive the Victorian era? What would be this dog’s attitude towards his mistress – the great poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning? What happens when a biographical content is treated from a purely fictional perspective? These are the questions posed, and answered, in the short novel Flush; a Biography. In this playful, seemingly frivolous but very lucid, stylistically flawless text, Virginia Woolf is dealing with the issues of history, society conventions and social justice, while exploring in the extreme the possibilities of rendering of the perceptual perspective of an animal.
Good Morning, World!
10,00 €Diaries by the famous Croatian writer Ivana Brlić Mažuranić, written in the 1880s when she was fifteen to eighteen years old. The book provides insight into teenage life in the 19th century in Zagreb, the charming young character of the writer, her thoughts on literature, life and death, as well as the seeds of conflicts awaiting a female writer – all of which makes it a highly interesting read.
Heroes and Dragons on the Decline
13,00 €Imagination and a certain freedom in his relation to language as well as an authentic poetical experience characterize Josip Čekolj’s first poetry collection. In four parts – four zeals – the lyrical voice of this young and talented author celebrates the novelty of his first worlds, from the home region, both in a concrete and a symbolic form, to the world of family and first loves. The magic of these poems mostly arises from the peculiar shifts from real to surreal, from bright images that depict an underlying emotion. The author builds his space of words, a space that is built from moments he has experienced. This space is often related to motives that originate in nature and in traditional culture, but it is consistently original, full of surprises and freshness.
Letters to his Wife 1914-1917
12,00 €My dearr heart, my lovely little one – thus begin the gentle letters Henri Barbusse wrote to his wife a hundred years ago. What follows is by no means gentle – trenches, shells, mud and the dead, the war that is revealed in its bloody meaninglessness. In the year 1914. the writer of letters, Henri Barbusse, was 41, had a reputation as a writer and editor, was not in the best health and had firm pacifist beliefs. Despite all this he volunteered for the French Army and spent the two first years of war on the front lines – and wrote his novel Under Fire, literary testimony of the World War I, which earned him the Goncourt prize and thousands of readers. Documentary material on which is based his novel is found in the letters he wrote almost daily to his wife Hélyonne. In their immediacy and authenticity, those letters can convey to the reader of today the drama of the beginning of the “short twentieth century” better than any fiction.
Notes from Encountered Lands
17,00 €Miroslav Kirin’s book of travelogues brings together notes from different periods of the author’s life, but thanks to the coherence of his view and characteristic stylistic refinement, makes an organic whole. You could call it a kind of triptych: it starts with notes from Paris in 2005, the middle and most complex part is dedicated to the author’s sojourns in China, and the book ends with very short notes from various trips through Croatia. The author’s observations move in a wide range: from very simple everyday little things that catch his eye to the broad cultural issues of the Far East. Despite the variety of motives seen in the “encountered lands”, the traveler’s eye shows the same curiosity and the same clarity. The moments he records often turn into micro-stories, and out of the multitude of human outlines that appear in his notes and notebooks, some gain fullness and turn into impressive characters. Poetry runs through Kirin’s notes as a kind of weft – sometimes as initiator of travel, sometimes as an object of work and thought, sometimes as a latent awareness of the poetic values of language. Therefore, this book can give pleasure to both travel lovers and to all those who enjoy good literature.
On Music
12,00 €A collectionof music critiques and essays by Croatian film director and erudite Zvonimir Berković. Texts he wrote over several decades for newspapers and magazines are collected in this book and divided into four parts: Critique – Portraits – Meditations – Conversations. Collected and edited by Bosiljka Perić Kempf.
Zvonimir Berković wrote about music only occasionally, in the mid sixties and the first half of the seventies, for several newspapers and magazines. He left chronicles of the music lives of festival cities as Dubrovnik and Vienna, but he also wrote reviews of both local and foreign artists’ performances during the Zagreb concert season. Most interesting, however, are the author’s imagination and subtle (and not only musical) taste in the portraits of musicians, interpreters and composers. Music had a deep impact in Berković’s work of movie director, especially in his “Rondo”, a Croatian classic made in 1966.
Paintings
12,00 €Paintings, a collection of prose poems, brings Segalen’s descriptions of imaginary Chinese visual art: thereby a dialogue is opened not only between different cultures, but also between different artistic media. The reader wanders around these foreign, strange places, sometimes lost, sometimes amazed but is always lead forwards by Segalen’s virtuoso writing.
Mala zvona brings the first integral Croatian translation of this poetic masterpiece.
Plastron, Pericardium
10,00 €The third book of poetry by Lidija Dujić, Plastron, Pericardium, includes five cycles of poems: Growers of Ice, The Time of the Desert, A Plate of High Tide, Wagon Tracks and Crop Rotation and Bunker of Angels. It is a poetry full of daring images, unusual associative sequences, rich with references to various fields of human experience. Combining elements from different language levels, the (erudite) author shapes and produces her poetic reality, with its own optics and artistic logic.