Format: 15×21
ISBN: 978-953-8313-30-1
Number of pages: 112
Hardcover
Published: 2021.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Biography of Ludwig van Beethoven written by his contemporaries.
13,00 € 7,80 €
“In the Rhythm of Horror – The Abyss of Dances” is a collection of six fantasy stories by young Croatian authors. The stories were chosen via a competition that Mala zvona held in 2020, after which authors Josip Čekolj, Mateja Pavlic, Marin Pelaić, Ines Vajzović, Martina Vidaić and Orin Ivan Vrkaš were chosen. Except for the characteristic fantastical elements of the unexpected and wondrous, the motive of dance also connects the stories – a dance of the dead and the arisen, a dance of half-humans and half-animals in the moonlight, an oriental dance of wraiths in black capes. These obnoxious dancers contribute to an uneasy atmosphere but at the same time, they create an aura of mystical beauty. Each story is illustrated with a black and white piece by Klara Rusan Klarxy – her work masterly depicts the merge of the real and the otherworldly, and makes a world that might seem dark and bizarre mysteriously alluring.
Format: 15×21
ISBN: 978-953-8313-30-1
Number of pages: 112
Hardcover
Published: 2021.
Biography of Ludwig van Beethoven written by his contemporaries.
The edition that will thrill every classical music lover! The year is 1840, in the city of Leipzig; the young but already internationally famous pianist Clara Wieck and the still quite unknown composer Robert Schumann just succeeded in getting married, despite various obstacles. The day after the wedding, upon Robert’s whish, they start writing down all their needs and desires, joys and sorrows of matrimonial life. They take turns in writing, each of them covering the events of one week, at first with a lot of passion. Many celebrated musicians of the period pass through the pages of their double diary; Robert and Clara speak about art, home concerts, days and weeks filled with music, but they also speak about love. In these first years of their marriage, years that have been among the most productive for Robert and a sort of setback for Clara, life is good, but it isn’t without its’ own shadows…
Jana Prević Finderle’s “Herbarium” could both be seen as a follow-up to her debut “The travertine bridge”, published in 2019, and its sheer opposite. One could argue that it’s a follow-up, because it is a book of short prose inspired by the author’s own experiences, delivered in a simple and direct way – and that it’s an opposite, as “The travertine bridge” was dedicated to travels and encounters, a horizontal motion through space, while “Herbarium”, a book about the lives of plants and the people closest to the author, focuses on travelling vertically, through time. For every herbarium, including Jana’s, is a book of memories. It seems that we live in times of increased sensitivity for the green world that surrounds us, a world that is getting more endangered with every day. But Jana’s soft spot for plantlife isn’t a result of any trend, although the need to create a herbarium made of words could have been influenced by the increasing eco-awareness in times of global warming. This author has, since early childhood, been living her life in close connection to plantlife, which enables her to talk about it from a personal, almost lyrical, perspective. Her authentic language depicts a simple closeness. The focus doesn’t lie on a problem or on the author’s knowledge of botany – which she clearly has – but rather on her personal experiences, her discoveries, little miracles she encounters, like the ones where her aunt Mirjana, in Jana’s adolescent days of spleen, tells her about an acorn and an oak.
Sanja Lovrenčić wrote the book of prose fragments entitled Zagreb Childhood in the Sixties while she was working on the translation of Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical Berlin Childhood around 1900,and her writing is therefore marked by an interesting duality. Zagreb Childhood functions as an autobiographical discourse and deals with the elements typical for that genre: introspection, sketches of the chosen period, a fine nostalgia for childhood, which an adult can reach only as a selection of fragments that can never be made into a coherent whole; those elements could be labelled as personal and local. On the other hand, however, the book is a response to a literary text, a reaction not to a childhood or a social change, but to a certain type of writing. This leads to a completely different set of ideas, that we might call inherently literary – intertextuality, the fictionalization of the self, the use of poetic language and lyrical fragments that simultaneously connote and transcend personal experience. Thus Zagreb Childhood combines two elements that are necessary to make a quality literature: inclusion in the local context, as well as its constant dissolution – both intimacy and universality.