Fox
Dubravka Ugrešić, Ellen Elias-Bursać (translation), David Williams (translation)Using the duplicitous & shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over & over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha dorothea dorothea butterfly after the woman who drove him cross-country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown & find love to magical effect.
Propelled by literary footnotes & “minor” characters, Fox is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that’s impassioned, learned, & hilarious.
Dubravka Ugresic was the author of 7 works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender & Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, along with 6 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, & the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2016, she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the “American Nobel”) for her body of work. She died in March 2023.
Ellen Elias-Bursać is an American scholar & literary translator. Specializing in South Slavic literature, she has translated numerous works from Bosnian, Croatian, & Serbian since the 1980s. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Gotz & Meyer was awarded the National Translation Award.
David Willia