Two become Nazis, one joins the Partisans, and one is sent to a concentration camp.Set in Yugoslavia prior to and during World War II, this tale of devastation traces the lives of four friends born in the same small town. They went to school together, took dancing lessons, stole kisses, were taught German by an old maid who kept a diary. But when war comes, half-Jewish Vera is sent to a concentration camp while her German cousin becomes a Nazi; Serbian boyfriend Milinko joins the Partisans; and another classmate, also a Serb, becomes fascinated by the magic of killing. Tisma's portrayal of their situation is certainly poignant, but he belabors the obvious in overly melodramatic fashion.

    the novel was condemmed by the Communist Party and subsequently banned. It is the first of his novels to appear in English.Alija Osmanovic, the protagonist of Knife, was orphaned during WWII as an infant. He was raised as a Bosnian Muslim and came to believe that the Serbs killed his family. When, as a young medical student, he goes in search of the identity of his murdered birth-parents, a sense of thwarted justice motivates him, and expresses itself as a burning passion for revenge. Alija seeks out Sikter Efendi, an eccentric and reclusive Muslim cleric, to help him interpret clues pointing to his identity. Through his mentorship, Alija discovers the truth: that his heritage is Serbian; that he was born not far away but in the neighboring village; and that his adoptive family was guilty of murdering his birth-family. A crisis of identity ensues. Each possible course of action open to him is bad. How is he to go on?

    In a series of letters to a brother-in-law, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and unthinkable violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of some of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and others.But the novel is more than an intellectual meditation. Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of an intellectual acting as a tool of repression. At the same time he questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the philosophical tradition he so admires-or if the line separating it from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.

    Destiny, Annotated balances postmodern self-awareness with an imagination grounded in history and tradition. Here is the embodiment of historiographic metafiction, a self-reflexive narrative that examines not only its own historical postulates but also the grounds and scope of historical knowledge itself. Readers will find themselves skillfully catered to, whether they prefer the traditional or the avant-garde. Petković gives us characters caught in the whirlwind of history, heroes who face their destinies and say no. Spanning the period from the 18th century to the 20th, this novel also conjures a fanciful and highly (post)modern vision of the place we know from Borges, that garden of forking paths.''Tihomir Brajović

    A Muslim, he marries a Christian girl who supports him while he dabbles in politics, eventually leading a raid to rescue a friend from jail.

    Lively, intelligent, and complex, she hides a big heart behind a surly look, and expresses herself in highly-colored, provocative language. Such language serves as an act of revolt against a society which has learned to distill horror-horror which her boyfriend encounters first hand on the battlefront. Coming across old belongings of her grandmother, Jelena reconstructs her tale, using imagination where the puzzle reveals no concrete truth.The life uncovered is one of passion and terror, and of crossed romance. A young woman caught between loyalties-to her step-brother, fellow explorer of sex and true friend; to her ideologies and principles; and to an officer of the formidable secret police. Does she resign herself to a disinherited life at the mercy of those running the country? And who is the father of her child? The grandfather of her grandchild?Selenic deftly links broken lives, bound by war across a chasm of half a century, in an elegant and amusing voice.

    His 1st poems appeared in the context of the Young Bosnia movement. The writing of its members is in marked contrast to their robust active personalities. The poems Andrić published before WWI are virtually indistinguishable in tone from much of what his contemporaries were writing. Nevertheless, it's probably true to say that in his case the role of the political activist, however sincerely he played it at the time, was fundamentally unsuited to him. By contrast, however, the prevailing melancholy seemed to match his temperamental reponse to the world. These early poems point in no particular direction, beyond establishing the free verse form of virtually all of Andrić’s poetry and a tendency to a mournful self-pity which sometimes threatens his personal statements. The prose poems written during the War represent a personal conffesion & cannot be considered merely the reflection of a literary vogue. “Ex Ponto” (refers to Ovid’s account of his Black Sea exile) was published in 1918; “Unrest” in 1920, when “Ex Ponto” was already reprinted. Thereafter Andrić refused to allow them to be included in any of his collections of his works published before his death. He rejected them because they seemed to him too intimate. But, they're important since they contain ideas & themes which recur in his later works. The strong emotional colouring was toned down in Andrić’s later prose poems & verse but their form, a combination of aphoristic statements & longer reflective passages, continued to appeal to him. “Ex Ponto” & “Unrest” record his emotional reaction to the circumstances of his early life & the development of a number of themes around the central paradox of his personality & work.

    He is opposed by Niels Nielsen, a melancholy intellectual who hurls invective at the dictator and the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of society. Barutanski himself despises the sycophants beneath him and recognizes in Nielsen a genuine foe; but Nielsen, haunted by his own lapses of conscience, struggles to escape both the regime and the role of opposition leader that is thrust upon him.Miroslav Krleza is considered one of the most important Central European authors of the twentieth century. In his career he was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, journalist, and travel writer. He also suffered condemnation as a leftist and a practitioner of modernism and his books were proscribed in the 1930s. The first two books of the trilogy The Banquet in Blitva were written in the thirties and their comments on political, psychological, artistic, and ethical issues earned him the enmity of Yugoslavia's increasingly fascist government. He did not write and publish the third book in the trilogy until 1962.

    

    It begins with the story of a brilliant but failed architect in Belgrade and his search for his father, an officer who vanished in Greece during World War II.The truth about his fate--some of it set in motion 2,000 years ago and some of it by the Nazis--is raveled in the history and secrets of Mount Athos, the most ancient of all monasteries, perched atop its inaccessible mountain on the Aegean.

    All of the folly and the horror of that time are revealed in the sarcastic report of the novel's teenage would-be authoress.

    Timeless tides, destined stroke of luck and an ambiguous human mind, all imbibe in them the undying threads which surrender the present to the anxious past. Fate, we shall see plays the game throughout the cycle of the book. It was not just the lives of the four characters, namely Kamala, Ramesh, Hemnalini and Dr. Nalinaksha who suffer the consequences of the wreck, but their destiny, the course of fate and the sufferings, everything.

    Told through a series of “historical documents”—memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, and maps—the novel details the story of these interventions and the historical moments where the Brotherhood has made their influence felt, from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to a lost story of Sherlock Holmes.Masterfully intertwining the threads of waking and dreams into the fabric of the present, the past, and the future, Svetislav Basara’s Pynchon-esque The Cyclist Conspiracy is a bold, funny, and imaginative romp.

    

    As her story is told, he reflects on her life and their relationship, attempting to come to terms with his Jewishness and his own new life in a foreign culture.