Ervin and the Madmen
The novels The Second-Hand Man and Ervin and the Madmen form a semantic and structural whole. This “black duology” is entirely devoted to the analysis of “negative existence.” At its center stands a man on the threshold of his fifties who has “grown tired of being human,” tired of living by the standards of others, and who feverishly seeks […]
Leica format
In the novel Leica Format, Daša Drndić depicts a provincial town and the petty-bourgeois mentality of its inhabitants — both the old residents and the ‘newcomers’ and immigrants. The main characters, some of whom were mentioned in her previous works, encourage readers to look for connections between them and to wonder whether they are based on […]
Our Man in Iraq
Our Man in Iraq is a social novel that, with a great deal of humor, addresses contemporary themes while also being a subtle love story that cannot escape the world surrounding it. Witty, ambitious, and intelligent – it is a novel that reshaped the image of contemporary Croatian literature. It is a story about today’s […]
Gloria in Excelsis
Gloria in Excelsis, a novel composed of three parts, three destinies, and three stories told by three narrators, is incredibly intricate and dense, further enriched by the interweaving of many other lives within the stories of these narrators. The central story follows a Bosnian Franciscan friar from the eighteenth century who, in the form of […]
Water, Spiderweb
Water, Spiderweb is one of the rare novels that seamlessly weaves together different genres into harmony. Within its pages one finds fairy tales, confessions, streams of consciousness, material taken from the Internet, psychological profiles of murderers – all the elements from which life itself is composed in its fullness, complexity, and linguistic diversity. Although a crime […]
The Eighth Commissioner
The story of The Eighth Commissioner takes place on the fictional, most remote inhabited island of Trećić, which officially belongs to Croatia but lives by its own rules. It functions without an organized government, has two churches and no priest, yet the inhabitants manage perfectly well on their own in their small utopia, living in harmony and […]
Diary of Apartid
Diary of an Apatrid is a story about the catastrophe of a particular region inhabited by various peoples, told with some borrowed Proustian characters and situations, since much of what occurred in that space is paradigmatic. In this sense, the French-German relations in Proust’s novels often reflect the Serbian-Croatian relations of the year 1991.
A City in the Mirror
With A City in the Mirror, Mirko Kovač completes his prose opus with a work that gathers his essential life and literary experiences, arranging them with remarkable precision into a mosaic of characteristic events and fully realized, vivid characters. Subtitled A Family Nocturne, the book takes the form of an intimate chronicle in which the narrator consciously […]
The Living and the Dead
Much like in his debut novel When the Fogs Lift, which placed him among the leading voices of contemporary Croatian war prose, Josip Mlakić in The Living and the Dead delivers a work of exceptional literary refinement, filled with numerous literary and cinematic allusions. Set in a dark, hopeless, and depressive atmosphere, the novel explores the very […]
Farewell, Cowboy
A Western set in a small Dalmatian town that stands in for the Wild West, Farewell, Cowboy is filled with action, tension, distinctive characters, and themes of principle and honor. It is a tender story about family relationships, confronting death, growing up, seeking truth and freedom, returning to one’s roots, and finally — departure.