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

Dada’s life is at a standstill in Zagreb—she’s sleeping with a married man, working a dead-end job, and even the parties have started to feel exhausting. So when her sister calls her back home to help with their aging mother, she doesn’t hesitate to leave the city behind. But she arrives to find her mother hoarding pills, her sister chain-smoking, her long-dead father’s shoes still lined up on the steps, and the cowboy posters of her younger brother Daniel (who threw himself under a train four years ago) still on the walls.

Hoping to free her family from the grip of the past, Dada vows to unravel the mystery of Daniel’s final days. This American debut by a poet from Croatia’s “lost generation” explores a beautiful Mediterranean town’s darkest alleys: the bars where secrets can be bought, the rooms where bodies can be sold, the plains and streets and houses where blood is shed. By the end of the long summer, the lies, lust, feuds, and frustration will come to a violent and hallucinatory head.

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.

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In Dada’s wild amalgam of quest story, social satire, and comic shtick (plus a surreal film-shoot scene featuring cowboys), you won’t catch Savicevic offering tidy diagnoses. You won’t care, thanks to prose that glints like the sea in the distance.

The Atlantic

Meet The Author

Olja Savičević

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Summers with Maria

By

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.

 

Pjevač-u-noći

Singer in the Night

By

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.