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100% Cotton

V.B.Z., 2014, 138 pages

After the great success of the novel The Hotel Tito, sold in tens of thousands copies in Croatia and translated into German, French, Czech, English and other languages, in which she dealt with the issue of war drama and its devastating consequences for a wartime-born generation, Ivana Bodrožić wrote 100% Cotton: fifteen excellent stories about the lives of women in the Croatian transitional society.

Adios, Cowboy

Algoritam, November, 2010, 208 pages
Full English translation and French sample available

Translation rights sold: UK (Istros Books), USA (McSweeney’s), Italy (L’Asino d’oro edizioni), Germany (Voland&Quist), France (JC Lattes), Spain (Baila del Sol), Netherlands (Bananafish), Sweden (Gavrilo förlag), Serbia (Laguna), Slovenia (Littera), Bulgaria (Ergo Books), Hungary (Europa Kiado)

Winner of Prix du premier roman en littérature étrangère 2020
One of the 100 best Slavic Novels of All Time
Winner of T-Portal Award for best Croatian novel

Savičević playfully transposes the genre of a traditional Western drama onto the contemporary world, challenging the omnipotent heroes of childhood and questioning what constitutes heroism today. Her shabby seaside hometown provides the perfect backdrop for this tale of loss and redemption, redolent of transient glamour and unrealised small-town dreams.

Apparition

Fraktura, 2018, 176 pages

In a godforsaken part of an unnamed country, near an unimportant village known only for its saffron production more than twenty-five years ago, suddenly and without an apparent motive, domestic and wild animals started to climb the hill G. and peacefully look at the sky. Electric fence is soon put up around the hill by the church authorities, along with other devices set to keep the animals away, and the miracle, like the nearby Marian apparition, remains forgotten until the suicide of reverend Leopold Hort. We learn about these events, their background and another suicide during the first apparition, in the last word at the trial against Albert Koc.

Circus Columbia

Feral Tribune, 2003, 110 pages
complete translation available in Spanish and Italian

Translation rights sold: Italy (Bottega Errante), Spain (Sajalin Editores), Bosnia and Herzegovina (Civitas), Serbia (with other stories, Red Box)

A political and romantic saga that covers the end of a century which tragically announced the beginning of a new era in the Balkans. Written is prose typical of the best of Bosnian writers – as the Nobel prize winning author Ivo Andrić – in its method of storytelling, in its creation and development of character, its consistent plot and specific sense of calm when presenting even the most disturbing content. 

I Dreamed Of The Elephants

Naklada Ljevak, 2011, 256 pages
complete translation available in German and Spanish

Translation rights sold: Spain (Sajalin Editores), Germany (Kunstmann Verlag), Hungary (Europa Konyvkiado)

A crime novel but also a great literary and social study of traumatic times in Croatia and its characters. A revealing story about the pathological affinities between the secret services and politics that have the elusive appeal of organized crime: typical social-pathological phenomena.

In a Sentimental Mood

Sandorf, 2017, 74 pages

excerpt available in English

What are the conditions for love and what kind of emancipatory potential can it bring about in a generation inseparably marked by war? Ivana Bodrožić relies on jazz standards to tackle these unpinnable questions, the dominant tone of her book finely imbued by the titular Duke Ellington’s 1935 classic.

Made in Slovenia

Beletrina, 2007, 190 pages

Translation rights sold: Poland (Biblioteka Balkan), Serbia (Rende), Czech Republic (Duhapress), Macedonia (Magor)

In short story collection Made in Slovenia Aleš Čar did something that is very difficult to do – he caught Zeitgeist on three printed pages (which is the length of the stories), he caught daily routines into fiction starting with public news accessible to everyone and finishing with private worlds and little stories with an emphasis on the individuals and their destiny.

Mallow Colour Of Nothing

Feral Tribune, 2007, 140 pages

Mallow Colour of Nothing is a collection of three stories (Green CastlePlease, Try and SleepAs Nothing Ever Happened), in part relying on the Đikić’s novel regarding a subject that is once more, but not always directly, connected to the war; the narrative style here is focused on changes of narrative division, time perspectives and certain inherited traditions of oral Bosnian storytelling. 

On Tolerability

Beletrina, 2011, 257 pages

30-pages excerpt available in English

A novel of complex structure that portrays one family’s extensive saga, following four generations through a period of hundred years, scattered throughout Europe.

Out of order

Beletrina, 2003, 168 pages

Two stories translated in English

Three stories translated in German

One story translated in Spanish

Translation rights sold: Poland (Wojciech Domachowski), Croatia (Fraktura)

Out of order is a shorty story collection with modern anti-heroes who are striving for safety and luck being disabled to achieve it by their tragic everyday life and the remains of transition. Very critical to characters. passiveness and addictions, Čar puts to question the status of young middle class population, their role in the urban city life as well as their resignation and unfulfilled emotional relationships.

Repetition. A Love Story

Naklada Ljevak, 2014, 136 pages
20-page excerpt available in English

Set in one winter night, beginning with the arrival of a more or less unexpected passenger and ending with one of the most poetic scenes in contemporary Croatian literature, Repetition has the discursive traces of a love story, a detective story and an elegy of the victim’s character but it cannot be classified in any of the aforementioned categories; it has a story on its own. 

Singer in the Night

Sandorf, May 2016, 152 pages
Full English and German translation available

Translation rights sold: UK (Istros Books), Italy (L’Asino d’oro edizioni), Germany (Voland&Quist), Serbia (LOM)

Winner of Pen English Award 2020

Singer in the Night is a rich, sensual novel which comments on perception, on how life is really lived – never objectively, never encompassing the whole truth, and yet no less real to us. In its final message, the novel gives a playful warning about the consequences of choosing banality – whether it be nationalism, vanity, or fame – over true human connection.

Sons, Daughters

Corto Literary / Hermes, 2020, 264 pages

30-pages long excerpt in English

Translation rights sold: Orfelin (Serbia), Seven Stories Press (World English), Sellerio (Italy), Libri (Hungary), Paradox (Bulgaria), Antolog (North Macedonia)

Winner of Meša Selimović Award 2021

In the vein of majestic works such as Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides or Margaret Atwood’s prose, the power of this novel lies in the ability of genuine literature to reshape the suppressed using it as a vehicle of personal and collective change. Ivana Bodrožić’ new novel tells a story of being locked in: socially, domestically and intimately, told through three different perspectives.

Split

aka Dreams and Backdrops

Jung und Jung, 2021, 182 pages

Full German manuscript and English sample available

Translation rights sold: World English (Amazon Crossing), Croatia (Fraktura)

A harbour town on the Adriatic serves as a backdrop for dreams which some people use for business, others for films and a few to make their fortune.

Srebrenica. A Story Of Evil

Naklada Ljevak, April 2016, 246 pages
60-pages excerpt available in English

Translation rights sold: Norway (Solum|Bokvennen), Italy (Bottega Errante), Sweden (Ramus), Czech Republic (Albatros)

Outstanding and unflinching documentary novel that follows the events that took place in the course of the three days and nights (between 13 and 16 July 1995) during which almost eight thousand Bosniaks were killed in the area of Srebrenica. The intention of this non-fiction novel is to research and to understand, using literary means, how was it possible for a JNA officer, raised in the spirit of Yugoslavia and genuinely devoted to the Yugoslav ideal and Titoism, to take charge of the operation to kill eight thousand people based exclusively on their ethnicity and religion.

Summers with Maria

Fraktura, Sep 2022, 176 pages
French sample available

Translation rights sold: Serbia (Booka)

Drenched in the Mediterranean sun, Summers with Maria is an auto-fictional history of five generations of women, in the vein of Ginzburg’ Family Lexicon and Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.

 

The Eighth Comissioner

Znanje, 2016, 216 pages

30-pages excerpt available in English

Translations: France (Gaia Editions), Germany (Dittrich Verlag), Slovenia (Mladinska knjiga), Macedonia (Kultura), Serbia (Rende), Ukraine (Folio)

INALCO Institute in Paris Readers’ Prize
Shortlisted for the Littératures Européenes Festival Award in Cognac
National Awards: Kiklop, August Senoa, Ivan Goran Kovacic, Vladimir Nazor, Ksaver Sandor Gjalski
Bestseller in Croatia with a successful movie adaptation that is now Croatian candidate for OSCAR in Best Foreign Language Category

The Eighth Comissioner takes us on a comical, intelligent and passionate dissection of an utopia, Mediterranean style.

Siniša is an ambitious politician who gets involved in a scandal. In order to keep him away from the public eye, the government sends him to Trećić, an isolated Croatian island with no telephone or internet signal. Even worse, Siniša doesn’t speak the dialect. There, he is put in charge of organizing the local elections – a task that seven commissioners before him failed to accomplish.

The Travelling Theatre

VBZ, November, 2020, 476 pages

Translation rights sold: Serbia (Booka)

The Traveling Theatre, the fifth novel by Zoran Ferić, a readers’ favorite and one of the most awarded and acclaimed Croatian authors, is an impressive work, a novel that would mark a grand event in any of the great European literatures

A harbour town on the Adriatic serves as a backdrop for dreams which some people use for business, others for films and a few to make their fortune.