Books in the Slovenian Literature series

With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young Torless, and of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipus's Young Tjaz, first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age. But Lipus, a member of the Slovene ethnic minority indigenous to Austria's southernmost province of Carinthia, wrote his novel in Slovene and aimed it not just at Austrian society's hidebound clericalism, but also at its intolerance of the ethnic other in its midst. When Austrian novelist and fellow Carinthian Peter Handke resolved in the late 1970s to explore his Slovene roots, the first book he picked up was Lipus's Young Tjaz, which served as his Badeker through the Slovene language, and which he faithfully translated into German and published in 1981.

A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Ales Debeljak has written: "e;The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the "e;big picture"e; will inevitably overlook the essential . . . [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."e;