Bøger udgivet af Istros Books

Quiet Flows the Una is the story a man who has been stung by the horrors of war. Through his meditative prose, Sehic attempts to reconstruct the life of a man who is bipolar in nature; being both a veteran and a poet, who manages to re-build his life by reconnecting with nature and the memories of an idyllic childhood.

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.

With this book, the author opens up a new dimension to the best-loved fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm - so familiar to us and yet so full of unfamiliar imagery and inexplicable plot twists. He reminds us that these are stories originally aimed at adults, and that they carry in their imagery a symbolic understanding and a worldview that can offer us a key to overcoming our otherwise insoluble challenges: thus through the Anthroposophical worldview, these fairy tales become the springboards to spiritual insights. For centuries, these myth-like stories have been retold and spread across generations. When the people in the countryside had finished their work in the fields and in the kitchen, they came together and tried to fathom the secrets of life by sharing their experiences and immersing themselves in symbolic images. At a time when the rational view of life has almost completely suppressed the mysteries of existence between earth and heaven, perhaps this is the time for us to perceive the cosmic archetypes on which these tales rest.

Grandma Non-Oui is a biographical novel that tells the life story of a woman from Split, Croatia. In her youth, Grandma Nedjeljka-or Non-Oui, as she goes by the nickname given to her by her French teacher (a literal French translation of the syllables of her nickname Ne-Da, Slavic for No-Yes)-falls in love with an Italian soldier, Carlo, at the end of the second World War and later moves to Sicily to marry him. Written as an exchange between Grandma and Nedjeljka, her granddaughter and namesake, a conversation unfolds that encompasses a broad range of times and places between 1938 to 2016, moving back and forth temporally from past to present, and geographically between Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily and Split, Croatia. Their imagined conversations reveal the lives of these two different women and the deep cross-generational bond between them, as they discuss cross-cultural love, private life, and family, as well as the public sphere of war, politics, and migration.

In Axonas/Axis, Curtis gives voice to the experience of trauma and recovery through the poetic language of imagery rather than graphic detail, attempting to convey the fundamental twist in the narrative - perhaps even a breakage - that needs to be mended through a synthesis of mind, heart and body working towards the integration of the whole. The whole self. Using Ancient Greek words/concepts and mythology as a springboard to launch into her own personal etymology - the origin and intimate meaning of words dear to her - juxtaposed against what we commonly expect from that word. Ultimately, these poems attempt to tread on Holy ground, the territory where symbol is created from suffering and metaphor from the muscle of language, the territory of healing and wholeness.

This harrowing tale, which spans sixteen hours and is told through the eyes of a mysterious narrator, delves into the bad blood between two timeless villages in south-eastern Turkey.

Jonah and His Daughter offers us an affectionate and vivid account of the reluctant, recalcitrant prophet Jonah, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of thousands of years, from the eighth century B.C. to the present day. In a sweeping narrative that pans out from the ancient port of Jaffa in the eastern Mediterranean to the modern-day cities of Prague, Munich, London and Bucharest, the first storyteller we meet is Jonah's daughter herself, and the last is a proud mother of twins in our own time. A colourful, variegated tapestry of tales within tales that interweaves myth, legend, family histories, and psychologies, the novel expands upon a familiar Biblical story in order to meditate on permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, and the irreducible mystery of the narrated self.

With a non-linear narrative that sees the protagonist travel and work across the world - from Russia to the Americas - Tampa engages in an addictive meditation on the deep significance of home.

The extraordinary storyteller and playwright Ludovic Bruckstein presents us with a lost world of Jewish history and lore in the central European Carpathian region, now parts of Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, invoking now lost storytelling tradition of great 'maggids' of Jewish history.

A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the context of their native Croatia. The dream of returning as a family to the sun-soaked terrace of their home in Dalmatia is what inspires them to face - and conquer all. Ivica Prtenjäa is a quiet novelist at ease in his craft, restrained in his narrative voice, while confident that his characters and their meandering fates will do their work on the reader. Let's Go Home, Son has got everything it needs. Family values, loss, guilt, shame, love, disappointment and cautious hope.

A collection to whet the appetite of anyone wishing to learn more about a region rich in history, folklore and (her)stories. Telling it like a woman does not mean literature for women only: it provides an insight into half of humanity, a window onto the lives of citizens who work, love and develop their inner lives. This collection brings together the voices of a wide selection of prize-winning and established authors:Balkan Bombshells brings together established Serbian and Montenegrin writers like Svetlana Slap¿ak, Jelena Lengold (winner of the EU Prize for Literature 2013), Dana Todorovi¿ and Olja Kne¿evi¿ (author of Catherine the Great and the Small, Istros 2020), together with a select group of up-coming writers: Marijana ¿anak (1982, Serbia): ¿Awakened¿ (Probüena) follows the early years of a girl from a very simple background, who discovers she has extrasensory powers. A gruesome fascination with biology allows her to attend high school, where she ends up sewing a voodoo doll to take revenge on a molesting teacher. Marijana Doli¿ (1990, Bosnia-Herzegovina & Serbia): ¿Notes from the attic¿ (Zapisi iz potkrovlja), originally diary entries, are intense mediatations on faith, love and hope ¿ poignant testimony to a struggle to cope in difficult times. Ana Milö (1992, Serbia): ¿Peace¿ (Mir) portrays a woman struggling with disparate feelings after her only child dies. She has long since broken up with the child¿s father. She enjoys finally having time for herself, but she has to confront accusations of people around her that she is heartless. Once a mother, always a mother? Katarina Mitrovi¿ (1991, Serbia):¿Small death¿ (Mala smrt). We are introduced to a fearful young woman who is far from happy with life, and we follow her on a summer holiday by the Adriatic, where a halfhearted romantic adventure takes a scary turn. Andrea Popov Mileti¿ (1985, Serbia):|: excerpt from the novel Young pioneers, we are seaweed (Pioniri maleni, mi smo morska trava; 2019). This stand-alone excerpt is a poetic flashback to her childhood in the province of Vojvodina in the Yugoslav era, to holidays by the Mediterranean, and to feelings of belonging and home. Lena Ruth Stefanovi¿ (1970, Sebria/ Montenegro): ¿Zhenyä is a fragment from her 2016 novel Daughter of the Childless Man (¿¿er onoga bez ¿ece), is an entertaining meta-story about an ordinary woman in the late Soviet Union, whom the author decides to grant a new lease of life, so Zhenya studies languages, becomes a mondain writer and moves with her new husband to Montenegro, where the author loses track of her.

For the Good of All is a book for our time - a time where we need a greater understanding of our bodily and emotional needs, as well as of our place in a globalised world where health has become a major issue. Since the beginnings of civilization, humans have relied on and respected the earth and its bounty, understanding that the energy of nature sustains and protects us when we live in balance. The aim of this succinct handbook is to encourage us to take an active role in our own well-being by bringing together the basics of good nutrition, mindfulness and vibrational medicine. Here you will find simple advice about diet and fitness, along with explorations of the more spiritual side of healing involving auras, meridian lines and the chakra system (our personal energy fields), ley lines (the earth's energy fields) and the energetic signatures of all that exists (the vibrational makeup of material and intangible phenomena which we tap into as we dowse). Everything contained in these pages has been composed, explained and published for the good of all. It is the first title of a new imprint that was inspired by and conceived by the work of David Willocks in New Zealand - mimosa books, named after the second star of the Southern Cross, a constellation beloved of the peoples of that nation and region.

Speculative and darkly surreal, the stories in Shadowselves examine characters who have stepped dangerously close to an edge they cannot see. A snow plow driver stranded on the roadside during a blizzard finds himself trapped in a riddled memory. A middle-aged man wakes up one morning to find he's gained four hundred pounds overnight, along with the unbearable regrets of countless strangers. A lonely child sets off to prove the existence of a mythic bird, but uncovers an ugly secret on the other side of town. A comatose teenage outcast traverses the liminal space between life and death. With a sometimes-tenuous grip on reality, and often haunted by mistakes, repressions, and alternate versions of who they might have been, the characters in Shadowselves struggle to find meaningful human connections in a world where the most important things always seem just out of their reach.

A staple in the literary scene for over forty years, Jonathan Baumbach has made another wonderful addition to his oeuvre with his latest collection,Flight of Brothers. The stories within are filled with the longings and lingerings, sex and deprivation, humor and heartache, as well as the New York nuances, that have driven Baumbach's fiction from the start.

At the age of 86, Dov Hoenig decided to travel back in his mind to WWII Bucharest to tell the story of his 12-year-old self and so many Jewish families caught in the midst of struggle and terror.

The book contains eleven dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devisenincreasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters inndifferent stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners¿ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.

A woman searches for identity amidst the deviation of war and the dislocation of immigration. Drndic's characteristic irony and sense of the weight of history set the prose alight. A book for all times.

Special Needs is a novel which affirms that which is authentically human within all of us, following the life of a young boy with physical difficulties who elects to speak only to those who truly see him.

The Masterpiece is a love story with tinges of the political thriller, written in a tantalizing prose style. Set in the golden years of 1980s Yugoslavia,

We all have our battles to fight, and for the author and main character, it is his near blindness since birth. This is the story of one man's journey to success within a small society, and his experiences with the 'blind men' of politics.

A richly detailed political novel in a fantastic setting which is part love story part thriller