|
|
The Survival Leagueby Gordan Nuhanović |
||||
|
ISBN: 978-1-932010-06-0 5 ½” x 8 ½”, softcover 104 pages $10.95 |
|||||
|
| In The Survival League, Gordon Nuhanović delves past Croatia’s post-war politics and focuses on the people struggling to heal old wounds and create new lives. With edgy, evocative prose, Nuhanović weaves darkly optimistic tales where nothing ever works out quite right: English lawns grow daisies instead of grass, and a romantic weekend in the mountains turns into a near-death experience.While war casts a shadow over all the characters, Nuhanović’s use of everyday events and occurrences makes The Survival League ring true in any culture. Caffeinated punks, male pattern baldness, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are all part of the lives the characters observe or reclaim. Through Nuhanović’s natural storytelling voice, we hear the stories of survivors, not only of war, but of life and its spectrum—from the mundane to the insane.
The Survival League’s humanity is universal, but a brief history of Croatia and an author’s note about the origin of each story create a firm cultural context for the English-speaking world. The book is not only an ironic glimpse into the limits of human endurance but also a lesson in modern Croatian culture. Already a hit in Croatia, The Survival League won the Society of Croatian Writers’ Nightingale Award and the Ivan and Josip Kozarac Award. The Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji List even voted it one of the top five books published in 2002. With the help of the Croatia’s Ministry of Culture, Ooligan Press proudly introduces this acclaimed storyteller to the United States. |
|
“Nuhanović places a candid camera in the spaces his characters inhabit… After a certain time period, they manage to do something crazy and unexpected, the way only real people can.” — Vlatka Vorkapić, theater director “Gordon Nuhanović turns the mundane upside-down and inside-out, then gives it a few diabolical twists…and makes it seem, somehow, still more familiar. It’s time for the rest of the world to abandon its deprecating stereotypes of ‘war-torn Croatia’ and recognize the unique riches—this book among them—that the reawakening country has to offer the rest of us.” — Peter Sussman, Author of Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog “An electric, ambitious, high-energy work.” — Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Arabian Jazz and Crescent “Existential angst from a natural story-teller’s voice which captivates the reader throughout. Each story ends in black humor, like those of the German writers after World War II in which the struggle for survival and perfection of the characters is proved absurd at the end of each tale…like the end of each human beings’s life itself. Everybody loses in the end, Gordan Nuhanović tells us in these ironically uplifting stories.” — Floyd Salas, author the award-winning books Tattoo the Wicked Cross, Buffalo Nickel, and State of Emergency “Gordan Nuhanović turns the mundane upside-down and inside-out, then gives it a few diabolical twists…and makes it seem, somehow, still more familiar. It’s time for the rest of the world to abandon its deprecating stereotypes of “war-torn Croatia” and recognize the unique riches—this book among them—that that reawakening country has to offer the rest of us.” — Peter Y. Sussman, author of Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog |
|
About the Author: |
Julienne Buŝić, the translator for The Survival League and Zagreb, Exit South, was born and raised in Oregon and has lived in the Republic of Croatia since 1995. In Croatia, she worked as an adviser in the office of the President until her retirement. Currently, she is a translator, an editor, and the author of the award-winning book of memoirs, Lovers and Madmen, written during her thirteen-year incarceration in an American prison. The memoir is now in its sixth Croatian printing, and a new, expanded English language edition was released in 2006. She has been published in many literary journals, both in the United States(Verbatim, The Gobshite Quarterly) and in Croatia (The Bridge, Kolo, Tema, Aleph). She is currently working on a new book, Living Cells.
| Press And Media |
|---|
| Insight Article |
| The Literary Lollipop Review |