Globetrotter

David Albahari, a Serbian writer and translator, has published eleven short-story collections and thirteen novels in Serbian, garnering the Ivo Andric Award for best book of short stories published in Yugloslavia (1982), the NIN Prize for best novel published in Yugoslavia (1996), the Balcanica Award, and the Berlin Bridge Prize, among others. He also has translated into Serbian the works of a host of English-language writers, from Saul Bellow to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vladimir Nabokov to Sam Shepard. He lives in Alberta, Canada. Ellen Elias-Bursac is a translator of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers. For her translation of Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer, she received ALTA’s National Translation Award.

“In Globetrotter, David Albahari explores the consciousness of emigres from the former Yugoslavia, Croatia and Serbia, showing that while abroad, many of us are even more intensely preoccupied with our histories than we were while living in Yugoslavia. His narrative, structured out of realistic details and perceptions with self-conscious meditation blending history, civilization and its discontents, and personal experience, reaches a density and intensity akin to Krasznahorkai’s and Thomas Bernhard’s. An intensely idiosyncratic narrative, enjoyable and thoughtful.”—Josip Novakovich, author of Shopping for a Better Country, a Man Booker International Prize finalist