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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shortlisted for the Predrag Matvejević Award 2021, longlisted for the Fric Award 2019 Sanja Lovrenčić’s books draw into her net a reader who is ready for adventure, for whom reading is not merely following a linear plot and a pastime, but recognition and acceptance of a game that, when joined, becomes infinitely meaningful, subtle and even fun. Her new novel, entitled Cabinet for Sentimental Trivial Literature, in which is its set, but which is also an indicative determinant of what will be told, is certainly one of the “more readable” of her novels, i.e. one in which there are no traps for readers, unless they themselves want to fall into them. Also, as is often the case with this author, its structure is built somewhat conceptually, by changing the epistolary form, which makes up the main flow of narration, with inserted stories that form a rounded and meaningful whole it. There has been a crisis in the Cabinet, which is a kind of small, private and non-profit museum that houses the legacy of “sentimental and trivial literature”. The curator, who writes letters to the late founder Rosa, realizes that not only does the Cabinet need a “cash injection”, but also a new guardian to replace him. Since this is not just an ordinary job but also has a specific emotional and, of course, sentimental value, neither is easy to perform, and a job advertisement that includes one of the key sentences of the novel: “Your story is more important to us than your qualifications”, will further complicate matters. (…) Ten candidates apply to the ad that had inadvertently implied that candidates should also be writers, and they bring with them stories about their professional and private lives, sometimes completely bizarre, but also stories that make up an integral part of the novel. While the curator, who is becoming more and more desperate and sceptical, fills letters to Rosa with fragments from his own and the Cabinet’s everyday life, as well as those concerning the past, origin and meaning of her and his museum, an unusual and “soft” legacy that seems to have been run-over by a time of different imperatives and priorities, the candidates succeed one another before him, with their experiences, but above all with the stories they enclose, enabling the novel to emerge from the closed space of the Cabinet into the outside, towards modernity and its peculiarities and problems. This “opening” – placed in stories within the story – subtly positions the novel towards recent reality, because it indirectly deals with the themes of art and artistic activism, social responsibility, commercialization and the entry of capital into unprofitable spheres of human activity, feminism. science and technology, but also love, which is one of the shared motives and concerns both interpersonal relationships and the preservation of some past values. (Jagna Pogačnik)
As a poet of proven skills, Sanja Lovrenčić sketches a mysterious heroine. Who is she? After reading, it is up to us to conclude. Or to let her continue to take shape within us for a long time. For, this collection of poems counts on the cooperation of a careful watcher and listener, a curious reader sensitive to language and its beyond. Sanja Lovrenčić invites us on an adventurous poetic journey through the poems/episodes of a very special, never fully expressible or sharply drawn protagonist, with whose joys, doubts, insights and resignations we easily empathise. (Dorta Jagić, ed.)
Longlisted for the Kamov Award 2021
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mladen Kopjar is an author with extensive experience in writing different types of literary texts. In “Point Nemo”, his first collection of poetry, this experience is reflected in the ease and skill with which he builds his poetic world, as well as in his thoughtful and consistent poetics. The origins of the poems are usually in everyday life, its spaces, objects, small events, memories, but thanks to the gift of observation and skillful selection of details, the author skillfully avoids the superficiality and banality of “realistic” writing. Freedom and imagination lead him from concrete experience to surreal images in which personal associations are mixed with various fragments from the ubiquitous virtual space. But the unique tone of this collection stems from the deep emotionality with which the whole is imbued; the author addresses (or talks about) his loved ones: wife, child, parents, meandering through areas of tenderness and pain. In that intimate space, the outside world is mirrored in flashes; the original clash between an authentically, intensely internal world and a diverse, sometimes aggressive external world gives this poetry strength and interest.
