Naklada MD, 2000, 174 pages
One short story translated in English
complete translation in German
Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Spain (Baile del sol Ediciones), Ukraine (Folio), Slovenia
Declared as the book of the decade in Croatia while being on bestseller list for more than two years, this extraordinary collection of short stories presents author`s recognizable grotesque world but offering us a more complex and consistent structure.
With his second collection of short stories, An Angel in Offside, honoured with the two most prestigious literary awards of the year (the Gjalski Award and the Jutarnji List Award), Zoran Ferić confirmed his status as one of themost important contemporary Croatian prose writers. The book went on to become a bestseller, which is not characteristic of short story collections, retaining first place on a bestseller list for two years. Critics unanimously agreed that this collection of stories was extraordinary, while, according to a survey, it was declared as a book of the decade.
Themes such as death, illness and phobias are present here as well, including Ferić’s recognizable grotesque world, although the structure is quite different; perhaps a nascent novel, perhaps a heap of truncated parts. One of the stories here, which is thematically related to hypochondria, is set in the waiting room of an AIDS clinic that almost becomes a theatre of the absurd. Another is about the branding Venetian galley slaves which makes reference to Mann’s Death in Venice, while the title story depicts the darkly comic funeral of a ten year old girl on the island of Rab. An Angel in Offside has been translated into German, Spanish, Ukrainian and Slovenian. The title story was awarded with the AGM Award for best story of Plima magazine, while the book was awarded with the Gjalski Award and the Jutarnji List Award in 2000. In Croatia, the book was published in four editions by Naklada MD, Profil International, Jutarnji List and V.B.Z.
Ferić is a writer with a crazy worm wriggling inside his head and whose work has a specific taste and smell; in the rather sterile landscape of contemporary Croatian prose there is a deficit of such writers.
Jurica Pavičić
Zoran Ferić wrote a really brilliant book of short stories, proving himself to be one of the best Croatian prose writers.
Delimi Rešicki
Naklada MD, 1996, 124 pages
one short story available in English
complete translation available in German
Translation rights sold: France (Éditions de l’Éclisse), Germany (Folio Verlag), Poland (Pogranicze Sejny), Ukraine (Lavov), Slovenia (…)
Ten stories in Walt Disney’s Mousetrap present Ferić as a brilliant analyst of stupidity, misconceptions, malice and vulgarity. His revelatory stories hit us right there where it hurts the most and where laughter – freezes.
Naklada MD, 2003, 198 pages
complete translation available in English, German, Italian
Translation rights sold: France (Editions Noir sur Blanc), USA (Autumn Hill Books), Germany (Folio Verlag), Italy (Nikita Editore), Slovenia (V.B.Z.), Turkey (Dora Basım Yayın)
A “Mediterranean Twin Peaks”, this social novel with a distincive crime-plot powerfuly provokes a deeply entranched bourgeois taste but is also an allegory for the atmosphere in the entire country of the 90s as the war and death find their very unispected and unusual ways to present.
Biblioteka Premijera, Jutarnji List, 2005, 188 pages
complete translation in German and Italian
Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Italy (Zandonai editore), Slovenia (V.B.Z.)
This novel, with a well-rounded and compact plot, deals with a provocative theme: the love between a forty year old highschool teacher and an ill seventeen year old schoolgirl. Although the theme is somewhat controversial and the relationship essentially comic, Feric writes about the true love; the kind of “funny” or strange love that transcends boundaries, questions moral laws, constantly mocking the tragic nature of death.
Profil International, 2011, 603 pages
40 pages excerpts in English
complete translation in German
Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Bulgaria (Avangard Print)
Considered by many to be Ferić’s best work. A novel of wider scope which incorporates a novel about growing up in Zagreb in the fifties and sixties of the last century, a story about the love between Senka and Tihomir that almost lasts a lifetime and a novel about the sexual revolution in the sixties and the seventies. Ferić covers all aspects of life – happiness, love, sorrow, old age and mortality.
VBZ, November, 2015, 341 pages
Excerpt of the novel available in English
Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Serbia (Booka)
Four years after the great literary success of The Maya Calendar Zoran Ferić returns to the scene with the novel that deals with man-woman’s relationships and its peripeteias. But unlike in the voluminous Calendar, here the author doesn’t write the complete life stories of its characters but rather catches them in the key episodes where those lives start to form or refract. The whole is fractured, but the novel is completed and rounded.
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.
