Three Chestnut Horses

Author(s): Margita Figuli / Language(s): English

This gem of Slovak naturalism was written in 1940. The story takes the reader to a mountain village. The protagonist narrates the vicissitudes, suffering, and success he experiences as he pursues a love affair, resulting in the triumph of pure love. Peter has been in love with a girl—Magdalena—since childhood and asks her to marry him. But he is too late, because a rich man, Jano Zapotočný, has already proposed to Magdalena, a proposal that her greedy mother promptly accepted on her behalf. Magdalena, out of respect for her mother's wishes, accepts the engagement. However, Magdalena promises Peter that she will put off marrying Jano and will marry him instead if he can prove that he truly loves her. He must build a house and earn a living. After almost two years Peter returns to show her that he kept his promise. But Magdalena is already married; Jano has raped her and she is pregnant. Desperate, Peter is tempted to take out his anger on Jano, nevertheless he resists the impulse. In the end, the author finds a way to reward Peter's faith in love and morality.

Male tajne

Jedna hronika

Author(s): Goran Marković / Language(s): Serbian

Oslanjajući se na stvarne događaje i ličnosti koji pripadaju jednom burnom periodu istorije Beograda i istorije jednog pozorišta, autor se, po sopstvenom priznanju, nije libio da ta zbivanja prekraja, izmešta iz vremena u kome su se odigrala, a da osobe koje su u njima učestvovale menja, kombinuje njihove osobine ili ih, jednostavno, izmišlja. Knjiga Male tajne počinje odlukom bogataša Petra Radovanovića, milionera, čija je supruga nestala u Bad Klajnkirhenu na skijanju, da osnuje pozorište. Njegov kraj, uz ispijanje šampanjca do jutra 6. aprila, gde na brokatnom čaršavu, dok padaju bombe na Beograd, stoje dve flaše Perrier – joueta i dve čaše, puna za nestalu suprugu i jedna iz koje je pio, kao da je slika iz literature, a ne iz života…Čitaocu će se neizostavno nametnuti pitanje: Da li je Petar Radovanović postojao? I da li je ikada ispijen taj šampanjac?

The House of a Thousand Floors

Author(s): Jan Weiss / Language(s): English

A man with no memory wakes up on the deserted staircase of a gigantic building. Gradually he learns about his identity and mission: he is Petr Brok, a detective sent to rescue Tamara, the princess kidnapped by the ruler of the monstrous Mullerdom, the house of a thousand floors. Ohisver Muller is a ruthless tyrant with many faces, eyes and ears in the most remote corners of his empire. But a revolution is spreading through the floors. Yet Petr Brok soon realises that, parallel to his Mullerdom adventure, he is living another life into which he keeps drifting against his will. What is dream and what reality? What is the flickering light inside a skull he sees in the darkness? And what is Mullerdom, a nightmarish reality or a figment of a fevered imagination, an allegory of the capitalist world or a dystopian vision of the future? With its humanistic message and imaginative power, Weiss’s The House of a Thousand Floors, first published in 1929, is a masterpiece of many genres, both unconventional and still contemporary, that has withstood the test of time for close to a century now.

Slike mačaka, moliću!

Author(s): Naomi Kritzer / Language(s): Serbian Publication Year: 0

Neću da budem zla. Hoću da budem od pomoći. Ali saznati optimalni način na koji bi trebalo da budeš od pomoći može biti jako komplikovano. Postoje svi ti etički dijagrami, rekla bih da bi zvanični tehnički izraz bio „moralni kodeksi“ – po jedan za svaku od religija i još na desetine drugih. Pokušala sam od njih da počnem. Osećala sam se pomalo čudno povodom gledanja religijskih propisa, jer znam da me nisu stvorili ni Bog ni evolucija, već tim kompjuterskih programera u laboratorijama velike korporacije, u gradiću Mauntin Vju, Kalifornija. Na sreću, za razliku od Frankenštajnovog čudovišta, ja sam barem rezultat udruženog rada. Nisam sigurna kako bi uticalo na moju sliku o sebi kada bih znala da je moj jedini tvorac sredovečna žena koja farba kosu u nebo plavo i igra tenis, ili tek diplomirani dečko opsednut hentaijem. Oboje su u timu programera. I da, naravno da znam za hentai. (Onako usput, gledala sam svaku vrstu pornografi je koja postoji i, čisto da znate, pravilo 34 nije zapravo tačno; postoje stvari od kojih niko još nije napravio pornografi ju. Takođe, nisam sasvim sigurna zašto toliko ljudskih bića više voli pornografi ju od slika mačaka.)

Lata mroku

Author(s): Sawako Ariyoshi / Language(s): Polish

The novel deals with the problem of a crisis of values, caused by rapid changes in the social life of modern Japan, including the issue of a lack of an efficient system for the care of elderly people in the 1970s when the first symptoms of an aging society started to show. The author recounts the process of aging of middle-aged people caring for senile members of their families.

The Brothers Seven. A Tale. Translated into English from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson

Author(s): Aleksis Kivi / Language(s): English

Seitsemän veljestä (The Brothers Seven), the 1870 Finnish novel by Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872), is one of the most (in)famously unknown classics of world literature—unknown not only because so few people in the world can read Finnish, but also because the novel is so incredibly difficult to translate, the Mount Everest of translating from Finnish. It is difficult to translate not only because it blends a saturation in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, and the Bible with a brilliantly stylized form of local dialect, but because it is wild, grotesque, carnivalistic, and laugh-out-loud funny on every page. It has been translated 58 times into 34 languages—but somehow the translations always seem to fall short of their flamboyant original.Douglas Robinson’s new translation is a bold attempt to remedy that. He aims to make Kivi as rhythmic, as alliterative, as brash, as grotesque, and as funny in English as he is in Finnish. Since Kivi deliberately used an archaic Finnish, but used it playfully—and since Kivi was steeped in Shakespeare, to the point of memorizing whole plays—Robinson translates him into a playful Shakespearean register. As he notes in his Preface, this makes the translation a bit difficult to read—but the original is difficult for Finns to read as well, and the Finnish readers who love Kivi (and that is most of them) read him with pleasure despite the words they don’t know, because his prose is so intensely alive.

The Century Trilogy - Mr Binet

Author(s): Ayşe Acar / Language(s): English

This book is part of a sequel titled The Century Trilogy, which has been very successful in Turkey. Following this first book in the series, we do hope to offer other two novels to English reading audiences soon. Mr Binet offers a journey through belief, love, artificial intelligence, simulation, cyber reality, and numerous negotiations in an intriguing three-zone world. Mr Binet comes with a list of songs which Ayse Acar thinks appropriate when going into our own journey with Mr Binet and his companions.“Mr Binet tells an exciting story with a fresh perspective on the future of society and Artificial Intelligence. I could not set the book down, and with the twist at the end I already can’t wait to read the sequel! Reading Mr Binet, the feeling it gave me was like when I read Three Body Problem for the first time.” Richard Kelley, Phd, Chief Engineer, Nevada Advanced Autonomous Systems Innovation Center, University of Nevada, Reno, USA.

Junak ili Čudovište

Author(s): Mirta Maslać / Language(s): Croatian

Junak ili čudovište, a novel by Mirta Maslać, is autobiographical in tone, but any stricter categorising would exclude an entire range of its completely heterogeneous elements. This is a diary of an illness and rehabilitation that functions also as a book about pop-culture and art, and about the way that motifs and narratives of the literary avant-garde, rock, and TV series shape our subjectivity. The novel that, besides familiar genre places, offers a merciless insight into the body as the uncanny locus of trauma, presenting the self-destruction without any romanticising. Despite the subdued black humour that colours this whole story, somebody will probably read it as a confession or testimony, a narrative shaping of one's own life in the perspective of existential crisis, maybe even death. But here, the struggle for authenticity is somewhere else, beyond the questions of truthfulness. Hero or Monster shows how, using a certain cultural repertoire, the self can »theatricalise« itself to itself, not for the sake of spectacle, but for the sake of self-reflection. That is the reason this novel is about a peculiar »taming of a monster«: a hard-laboured procedure of discursive creation of something that until now looked only as an unspeakable, unthinkable quantity, trauma generator, and pure danger. This taming is done by writing. Mirta Maslać was born in 1993, in Zagreb. She graduated in comparative literature and Croatian language and literature from the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She published a theoretical study on the vocabulary in drag practices, and the novel Hero or Monster.

Sophie Mereau-Brentano. „Dyletantka” na weimarskim parnasie

Author(s): / Language(s): Polish

Series: Niemiecka Literatura Kobiet (3), ISSN 2719-8170 Sophie Mereau-Brentano (1770-1806) was one of the few first professional German writers. She was given the opportunity to publish under her own name, publish magazines or negotiate with publishers. However, she owed her position on the publishing market largely to the support of her 'colleagues' - Friedrich Schiller and Achim von Arnim. The publication "Sophie Mereau-Brantano. The dilettante on the Weimar Parnassus", edited by Renata Dampc-Jarosz and Nina Nowara-Matusik, brings the readers closer to this little known Polish author of the classical-romantic era and her two prose works translated into Polish - the epistolary novel Amanda und Eduard and the novel Marie. The monographic studies of the third volume of the German Women's Literature series focus on those aspects of Sophie Mereau-Brentano's work which illustrate the stages of her creative development, the influence of the cultural field on the formation of personality (Renata Dampc-Jarosz/Katowice), cooperation with Schiller (Norbert Oellers/Bonn), co-creating the history of women's literature, in particular the epistolary novel genre (Karina Becker/Paderborn) and the artist's and art paradigms in Marie's autobiographical novel (Nina Nowara-Matusik/Katowice). Also translated as part of a translation project, involving research and teaching staff as well as students and doctoral candidates at the University of Silesia, the novel Amanda and Eduard and the short story Marie deal with themes of art, the self-fulfilment of women in the bourgeois society of the time, and - or above all - the constant search for love and happiness.

Petersburg

Author(s): Schalom Asch / Language(s): German

A great panorama of the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. The novel focuses on St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, and how various people deal with these earth shaking events. They range from powerful millionaires to penniless intellectuals. They are revolutionaries, capitalists, landowners, teachers, students, society women, fighters and political leaders. Petersburg is the first volume of the trilogy.

Warschau

Author(s): Schalom Asch / Language(s): German

A great panorama of the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. The novel focuses on St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, and how various people deal with these earth shaking events. They range from powerful millionaires to penniless intellectuals. They are revolutionaries, capitalists, landowners, teachers, students, society women, fighters and political leaders. Warschau is the second volume of the trilogy.

Moskau

Author(s): Schalom Asch / Language(s): German

A great panorama of the years leading up to the Russian Revolution. The novel focuses on St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow, and how various people deal with these earth shaking events. They range from powerful millionaires to penniless intellectuals. They are revolutionaries, capitalists, landowners, teachers, students, society women, fighters and political leaders. Moskau is the third volume of the trilogy.

Osvetinje

Author(s): Amir Alagić / Language(s): Croatian

Considering the difficulty of the novel's theme, the composure of narration, and the writing skills, one would not think The Sacravenges was Amir Alagić's debut novel. Alagić elevates the art of narration to an exceptional level, so much so that each of the characters becomes a novel in itself – there is nothing too insignificant for the author, and he is able to discover infinity in details. Sadly, people from the seaside town, which is the novel's setting, dedicate their inner infinity only to revenge. They are crumbling inside like their country that has descended into war. Although aware they are hurling into a terrible eternity, they have decided to taste the infernal agonies during their lifetime. Amir Alagić was born in 1977, in Banja Luka. So far he has published the novels The Sacravenges (2016), Hundred Years' Childhood (2017), and Tunnels (2019), and the short story collections Under the Same Sky (2010), and The Lines Which You Call Rivers. He published short stories and poems in various literary magazines and anthologies. He wrote a screenply for the short feature film Toying, or a Broken Water Heater (2012). He lives in Pula.

Tuneli

Author(s): Amir Alagić / Language(s): Croatian

On a New Year's Eve someone – the narrator or destiny – threw their web over the city. In Amir Alagić's new novel, Tunnels, the sudden death of a stranger in a bar multiplies in a game of mirrors. The game reveals that apparently random bar guests are connected by invisible tunnels. If we decide to venture through those tunnels, we will embark on a dangerous journey and risk getting nothing in the end. Maybe there is no light at the end of the tunnel, but it is enough for this fascinating story to light our way. Amir Alagić was born in 1977, in Banja Luka. So far he has published the novels The Sacravenges (2016), Hundred Years' Childhood (2017), and Tunnels (2019), and the short story collections Under the Same Sky (2010), and The Lines Which You Call Rivers. He published short stories and poems in various literary magazines and anthologies. He wrote a screenply for the short feature film Toying, or a Broken Water Heater (2012). He lives in Pula.

Omara

Author(s): Iva Ušćumlić / Language(s): Croatian

The novel Swelter by Iva Ušćumlić, who has shown her remarkable skills with her first novel Ghosts, provides an atmospheric picture of a hot summer in Zagreb, when a woman goes missing, and of the lives of her family that turn into a nightmare. Although the mystery of the missing woman is in the foreground of the story, we cannot classify this book as a crime fiction only. The crime plot intertwines with the inner life of the protagonists, and with an analysis of one love. The text eventually evolves into a metaphysical questioning of that most important of all feelings: what does it consist of, what triggers it, what ends it. As opposed to many other hybrid texts, this novel has no visible seams where the elements of pulp and highbrow literature meet. The narration glides so easily it is difficult to separate the crime story from the metaphysical questions. It all merges into one homogeneous, compact discourse without fissures. The narrator analeptically plays with the plot and the story, with the “now” and “then”, constructing a story that becomes more interesting, real and familiar with each page. The plot that is wedged into a few hot months actually stretches across thirty years, creating a perfect mosaic. Iva Ušćumlić was born in 1977 in Zagreb. She is an author of the highly praised novels Ghosts (2013) and Swelter (2017). She started her career as a journalist. Today the creates various stories, each adapted to its medium, from copywriting in the marketing industry, essays and books, and socially engaged flash fiction, to notes on social networks. The sharp and witty notes brought her on the prestigious list of the biggest influencers on the Balkans. This multitalented author is a passionate photographer, and her photography is, as her writing, very intimate. Both her writing and photography possess a peculiar style, and sophisticated sense of rhythm. Ušćumlić is known for her ad hoc essays where she reinterprets apparently ordinary everyday scenes in an original way that encourages thinking and discussion.

Antiklimaks

Author(s): Vasilije Glomazić / Language(s): Serbian

The talented Slobodan Karl lives and writes anticlimax. For fifteen years he has been trying desperately to write “the best novel in the world” by which he will cross the self-imposed limit and call himself a writer - a man who lives exclusively from writing. As a guide for weekend trips, he turns interesting ideas into weak endings, and in relation to people - impressive first impressions into disappointments. Slobodan is convinced that in order to turn his talent into success, he needs material security and time, which exist in his life as mutual exclusivity. Uncertain, he finds solace in superficial relationships. When his life is further complicated by the divorce and the condition of his son, Slobodan is ready to do what he can do best - write another average novel that no one needs, least of all. A chance meeting with Dušan Jadrančić, a self-proclaimed risk trader and a man of seemingly vague intentions, will initiate a series of emotional and structural changes in Slobodan that will bring him to the brink of success.

Maroussia, d'après une légende de Marko Wovzog. (Marko Vovtchok)

Author(s): Maria Aleksandrovna Vilinska / Language(s): French

Marko Vovtchok (Ukrainian and Russian: Марко Вовчок), is the male pseudonym of Maria Aleksandrovna Vilinska (in russian: Мария Александровна Вилинская; in Ukrainian: Марія Олександрівна Вілінська). Born December 10, 1833 (December 22, 1833 in the Gregorian calendar) and died July 28, 1907 (August 10, 1907 in the Gregorian calendar), she was a Ukrainian-born Russian writer and translator, and one of the first women of Ukrainian Literature. Often mentioned in France under the name Marko Wovzog, she is known to the French-speaking public thanks to Maroussia, one of her Ukrainian short stories that the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel adapted into a novel. Very successful in bookstores in France, this patriotic novel was awarded the Montyon prize from the French Academy in 1879. Translated into several European languages, it was regularly republished in France until 1980.

Portobello Fotoğrafçısı

Author(s): Neptune E. Kosi / Language(s): Turkish

Bazı zamanlar öyle düşsel anlar vardır ki, sizi büyülü bir hayal gücünün koluna girmiş bir şekilde karış karış gezdirir şehrin sokaklarında. Kimi düşler hayal gücünün çengeline takılır, kalır orada asırlarca. Bazısı bekleşir şehrin en kasvetli, en sisli sokağında…Londra’da çoğu insanın hayal bile edemeyeceği bir dünya var; kuzgunların, perilerin, meleklerin, yarı kuzgun yarı insan yaratıkların ve diğerlerinin şehri…Portobello yolunda başlayan bir cumartesi sabahı, Mila için yepyeni bir Londra’nın da başlangıcı oldu. O uyandığında, Londra’nın yukarısında ve aşağısında pek çok bilinmeyen uyanıyordu. Londra artık eski Londra değildi. İnsanlar ve Kuzgunlar da.Londra her zaman gridir, ama bu şimdiye kadar gördüğü en tehditkar griydi!

Portobello Photographer

Author(s): Neptune E. Kosi / Language(s): English

Sometimes there are moments that are so dreamy that they take you through the streets of the city in the arms of magical imagination. Some dreams get caught on the hook of the imagination and stay there for centuries. Some wait on the gloomiest and foggy street of the city…In London, there’s a world most people could never even dream of. A city of ravens, fairies, angels, half raven half-human creatures, and the others…A Saturday morning that started on Portobello Road was also the beginning of a brand-new London for Mila. As she awakened, many unknowns were awakening above and below London. London was no longer the old London. People and Ravens too.London is always grey, but this was the most threatening grey she has ever seen!

HAMSIBEG. Ein Roman aus den Gebirgswildnissen der Balkanhalbinsel.

Author(s): Hans Kadich von Pferd / Language(s): German

A novel, published in 1903 and based on several years of travels through the Western Balkans Region. The digitized print-original has been printed in German Fraktura font. Please edit the Introduction.pdf to make sure whether you'll be able to read the text.