Istros Books

All of Drndic’s award-winning work fluctuates between fact and fiction, and 'Dying in Toronto' gives an account of the author’s first year in Canada as a refugee, in 1995. While the book is written in form of essays, it is clearly shaped to tell of that year as a story, and the result is unique in both form and content, combining new techniques of creative personal confession and acute social perception, which offer a rare depth of insight and breadth of perspective on the real, difficult life of an immigrant. Examining the instinct of the good citizen, our narrator considers the confusion of the multinational myth of the ‘Nee World’ through her highly refined, critical intellect. Along the way she creates nothing less than the portrait of a new literary figure – the contemporary intellectual refugee – a point of view at once of its time and acutely contemporary. 'Dying in Toronto' is lucid and tenacious, witty and sad, revealing once again the author’s inability to reconcilable with the status quo, and her committment to fight for justice.

In this striking collection of short stories, written over a twenty-year period, we find Bruckstein, the storyteller, at his most lyrical. Having completed his works charting the Jewish history of his family and community in the Carpathian town of Sighet (The Trap, With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain, The Fate of Yakkov Maggid, also published in English by Istros), his voice is here set free to explore the joys in the details of the everyday. The collection opens with an invitation to a wax-work museum, where the viewer is not confronted with the likenesses of the rich and famous, but of ordinary people; neighbours and acquaintances each with a story to tell, each looking for that elusive feeling of happiness, which, unless we are very vigilant, is so often recognised only in retrospect. His heroes’ lives are presented with deep understanding, with humour, sometimes bordering on irony, but always with empathy and love. A sensitive reader need only follow the invitation, and let the wisdom of these stories guide them.

After his dramatic divorce and at the age of forty-two, Stratos Achtidis returns to his family home to live with his mother and brother. Humiliated and feeling cut off from family and friends, he turns to drink and reminiscences of a over-glorified past. Through the eyes of Stratos, the reader experiences the challenges and changes that have taken place in Greek society over the last quarter of a century; the problems of the ordinary working-class Greek people who have faced existential challenges on a financial level, the arrival of a huge migrant population and the consequent changes in their way of life. Georgoula has written a pitch-perfect portrayal of the male psyche, of a certain kind of Greek male, often with brutal authenticity. Call Me Stratos is not just a good read, it is a vivid portrayal of some of the most important aspects of Greek society.

The Romanian writer Mircea Eliade is best known in the English-speaking world as an influential Historian of Religion, author of such works as The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return. However, Eliade’s body of work is much broader, and throughout his life he kept the world of fiction and mysticism very close to his heart. Starting at the age of fourteen, Eliade continuously produced works of fiction alongside his academic work.This volume consists of six of his best short stories, taken from over a 30-year period, starting in 1959 with A Fourteen-Year-Old Photograph – the tale of a distance healing in which the patient claims miracle while the healer admits artifice - and including perhaps his most famous short story, the time-shifting At the Gypsies, and culminating with In the Shadow of a Lily, the last story Eliade is known to have written. Each of these stories is dense with allusions and interwoven with connections and references drawn from the imagination and vast knowledge of a great man. Who knows what secrets they may conceal? One thing is for sure - they will repay repeated close reading, but will also charm on the first encounter.

When the main character, a successful writer, experiences writer’s block, he withdraws from his malign fate to Berghof, a Swiss clinic. A number of famous names in world literature are already receiving treatment there, from Martin Amis, Graham Greene and Saul Bellow to J. M. Coetzee. But is Berghof really what it purports to be? And what role does the ever-silent figure of Scheherazade play in the novel? ''My Kingdom is Dying'' is not just a hybrid of the genres of confession - detective story, memoir and fictional biography - but also a unique combination of fiction and metafiction, literature and meta-literary reflection. Readers follow a gripping story in which unusual events unobtrusively mingle with meaningful reflection and deep insights.