Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith presents: Olga Tokarczuk for FLIGHTS

Olga Tokarczuk will be in conversation with translator Jennifer Croft and writer Askold Melynczuk as part of the Transnational Literature Series. For more information, please contact series curator Shuchi Saraswat at shuchi@brooklinebooksmith.com.

Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated and beloved authors, a two-time winner of her country’s highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Her work has appeared in n +1, BOMB, and Asymptote. Jennifer Croft is an American author, critic and translator who works from Polish, Ukrainian and Argentine Spanish. She was awarded the Man Booker International Prize along with Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, for her translation of Flights. Askold Melnyczuk is an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations

About the book:

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

A visionary work of fiction with “echoes of Sebald and] Kundera . . . There’s] no better travel companion in these turbulent, fanatical times” (The Guardian). A seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith Presents: Dubravka Ugrešić and American Fictionary

Dubravka Ugrešić will be in conversation with translator Ellen Elias-Bursać as part of the Transnational Literature Series. For more information, please contact series curator Shuchi Saraswat at shuchi@brooklinebooksmith.com.

Dubravka Ugrešic was born in the former Yugoslavia (Croatia). She is a novelist, essayist, and literary scholar and the author of seven works of fiction and six collections of essays. She has won, or been shorlisted for, more than a dozen prizes, including the NIN Award, Austrian State Prize for European Literature, Heinrich Mann Prize, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Man Booker International Prize, and the James Tiptoe Jr. Award. In 2016, she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the “American Nobel”) for her body of work. Ellen Elias-Bursać is an American scholar and literary translator. Specializing in South Slavic literature, she has translated numerous works from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.

About the book: 

Winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature

In the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic—winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature—was invited to Middletown, Connecticut, as a guest lecturer. A world away from the brutal sieges of Sarajevo and the nationalist rhetoric of Miloševic, she instead has to cope with everyday life in America, where she’s assaulted by “strong personalities,” the cult of the body, endless amounts of jogging and exercise, bagels, and an obsession with public confession.

Organized as a fictional dictionary, these early essays of Ugresic’s (revised and amended for this edition) are as pertinent to today’s America as when they were first published. It’s here, in these pieces filled with Ugresic’s unparalleled wit and devastating observations, that the comforting veil of Western consumerism is ripped apart as the mundane luxuries of the average citizen are contrasted with the life of a woman whose country is being destroyed.

Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth & Ellen Elias-Bursać.