Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark
Famous letters by Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time in Croatian translation.
Letters to his Wife 1914-1917
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.
Lili
Playing with the motives of Andersen’s “Little girl with the matches” Melita Kraus tells the story about a little she-dog named Lili, whose old master got ill and had to go to the hospital – on the Christmas Eve. The little dog is left alone and tries to win someone’s attention, but nobody cares for her. Very tired and hungry she rambles through the town, until she is too exhausted to continue. She lies down and sees – in a dream – her dog-parents. They give her advice – to knock at the door in front of which she is lying…
Simply told and emotional, ideal reading for the young children (+3).
Meandering with Julije Knifer
“Whenever I find something that I like, I want to tell a story about it” , says the narrator of this book. But she will by no means tell the story of Julije Knifer and his famous meander motif alone. The painter himself talks about anti-paintings and anti-bulbs, about the rhythms of black and white, vertical and horizontal lines, research and the search for extremes – all of this in his own words taken from original diary entries. And the illustrations inspired by his art also tell the readers about his journey towards and with meanders in their own way. In the fifth picture book of their Croatian fine art series, Sanja Lovrenčić and Dominik Vuković present the work of one of the most original and respected Croatian artists of the twentieth century, well-recognized abroad.
Monsters
Lili loves colours. Everything around her is always colourful. Her room, her drawings, her clothes, her thoughts. Until one Monday, when Lili loses in a race and nothing can help her feel better. One by one, monsters come and steal colours out of her life, leaving her in a sombre world as she deals with disappointment and sadness. But Lili will find out that, even though it does not always seem so, colours have a way of finding their way back into our lives – with a little help from our friends. An important story told in a simple yet effective way, with gorgeous illustrations by award-winning artist Klasja Habjan.
Notes from Encountered Lands
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.
Notes from the Source, Questions for Later
21,00 €An architect with previous experience as author, in his new book conceived as a sort of travel journal, Tomislav Pavelić reflects on the (co)relationships between man and nature, space and place, history and the present. At the end of his often erudite considerations, he asks questions that serve as both the starting point and the destination of these journeys. Without offering hasty answers, he invites us to approach universal problems with an open mind, illustrated in concrete examples of the regions visited, which form the colorful and dynamic decor of this book: places like Armenia, Sicily, Andalusia, Albania etc. All of these locations and cultures can teach us something about the past, but at the same time they allow us a clearer view into the murky and uncertain future of our civilization.
On Music
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.
Once
In this extraordinary picture-book the story keeps returning to its beginning. At every page, Igor Rajki starts out with the classical formula “Once there was a…”, only to interrupt the narration and turn to something else. The little sketches created in this way as well as the reasons the author offers for never finishing any of his stories finally build up to a hilarious mosaic of anecdotes while constructing a somewhat nervous but highly entertaining narrative voice. The visual artist Krešimir Zimonić responded to the fragmentary narrative style by using techniques of collage which combine drawings, photographs, graffiti styled writings and “ready-made” visual material. Once is, for this reason, a thoroughly sketchy and incredibly rich little book.
Paintings
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.
Piccola con piccolo
The little girl Piccola shows an unusual feeling for sounds. Imitating the chirping of birds, the crackling of fire, the sounds of the wind and everything else that surrounds her, Piccola amazes the listeners singing her little melodies. When she comes to a
music school and old Professore starts teaching her to play the piccolo, the smallest girl with the smallest flute becomes ‘Piccola con piccolo’; her Bird Music becomes a huge success and she is invited to perform all over the world. Piccola con piccolo
is the first picture book written by Bruno Mezić. Creating a likable character of the little girl Piccola,
telling about her adventures in sound, and skillfully playing with Italian words, the author introduces young readers to the terminology of classical music. Illustrations by the young visual artist and designer Klasja Habjan imaginatively and playfully follow the text and bring to life the original little heroine and her music.
Book #3705
Plastron, Pericardium
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.
Point Nemo
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.
Rascals in the Gutter
In the best tradition of young adult novels, but with a fresh voice, Josip Čekolj recounts the story of his rascals — four friends on the brink of adulthood. Although the town through which they roam is imaginary, their love and confusion, their conflicts and blunders, much like their need for warmth and belonging are all very real. As the rascals learn to find their way ‘in the gutter’, various characters show up to guide them along. Some are more trustworthy than others, and they largely come from the fringes of society, with perhaps the most important being an old lady with her cats and flair for poetry. And as usually happens in coming-of-age stories, their wading through murky waters becomes a first step towards maturity. The inspiration for this book was the exhibition ‘Rascals and Frogs’ by the visual artist Dominik Vuković, themed around memories of childhood. He illustrated this edition in close collaboration with the author, resulting in a special relationship between the text and illustrations.
Red Doves
The plot of this novel begins with the female narrator’s arrival on an unnamed Mediterranean island. She has inherited a house in an almost abandoned village and comes to see it; it is a good reason to get away from her daily struggles for a while. The landscape around her is nostalgically idyllic: crumbling stone houses, wild capers, homemade cheese, sunshine and wind. Everything suggests that there, at a distance from people, precarious jobs and urban routine, she’ll find a space for introspection, for facing her past, her desires and hopes. Along with the house, however, the narrator inherited a dovecot with a flock of pigeons bred by her deceased cousin, Toni. When she decides to release them from their prison, she has no idea that these homing birds will soon return to her along with six peculiar guests – Toni’s old friends. They organize a memorial party for him, and during three consecutive evenings they relate fragments of their shared past. Were they an international theater troupe that wandered the Mediterranean small towns in the seventies, or active participants in the political turmoil of the age of lead – it is difficult for the heroine to decide. At the end of the party, before they go away, the strange guests explain the true nature of her newly acquired inheritance: along with the house, she gets the obligation to tell their story, a story she did not fully grasp. And that’s where the Mediterranean idyll comes to an end: it will be replaced by a research into international terrorism in the 1970s, a personal revolt against the clash of wealth and poverty at that time and in the present, growing compassion for non-human living world and growing anger provoked by deadly business practices, cyber-subversions, anger, fear and escape. To the fragments of her guests’ stories the heroine will react creating her own, a story that she will – when the storm she provoked subsides – almost unintentionally leave as a legacy to the new generation.
Safe Journey
Beatrice Masini and Gianni De Conno, the award-winning Italian tandem, communicate in this picture book the artistic and emotional experience of travelling. The combination of magnificent oneiric images and the poetic prose takes us on a journey into the unknown: sometimes the destination is known, and sometimes the trip is just aimless wandering; sometimes we encounter obstacles and surprises, sometimes “treasures we don’t know yet of.” Every journey is a unique experience; and the insights we gain, the feelings we go through, and the memories we create are its precious consequences. Attractive illustrations and suggestive short sentences stimulate imagination and their dreamy quality has won numerous readers; in 2018 Beatrice Masini and Gianni De Conno received the most prestigious prize in the field of children’s literature “SuperPremio Andersen”. For the great Gianni De Conno, this picture book marked the end of a life’s journey; it is the last and farewell gift he left us before his untimely death.
Book #3340