Encyclopedia of the Dead

by Danilo Kis, Michael Henry Heim (Translator)

Overview

The most famous collection of short fiction by acclaimed Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis. In these nine stories Kis depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes—the multitude of details that make up a human life. Kis combines fiction and history in postmodern style, and in a postscript provides fascinating historical backgrounds and other notes for the reader that add interest and context. An enduring classic of Slavic literary fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810115149
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	01/07/1998
Series:	European Classics
Edition description:	1
Pages:	201
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

DANILO KIŠ (Serbian Cyrillic: Данило Киш) (1935-1989) was a Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian. Kiš was influenced by Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Ivo Andrić, among other authors. His most famous works include A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and The Encyclopedia of the Dead.

MICHAEL HENRY HEIM (1943-2012) was a Professor of Slavic Languages, at the University California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his doctorate at Harvard in 1971. He is an active and prolific translator, and is fluent in Czech, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian.

Table of Contents

Simon Magus
Last Respects
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
The Legend of the Sleepers
The Mirror of the Unknown
The Story of the Master and the Disciple
To Die for One's Country Is Glorious
The Book of Kings and Fools
Red Stamps with Lenin's Picture
Postscript

Editorial Reviews

"... the [title] story is one of the most moving I have ever read, a testament to both the power and the weakness of literature and human memory; it’s both an elegy and a howl of impotence, resonating in more dimensions than the two of the printed page." —The Guardian

"[Kiš's] pen, often literally verging into eternity, does to his characters what nearly every known creed aspires to do to the human soul: it extends their existence, it erodes our sense of death's impenetrability." —Joseph Brodsky


"Remarkable . . . A shadow of death darkens this book, but it is a beautiful shadow and a luminescent darkness." —Josef Skvorecky, The New Republic


"This is one of the finest fantastic collections since Borges's Ficciones." —Brendan Lemon, The Nation

From the Publisher