Belgrade Noir

Oto Oltvanji was born in 1971 in Subotica, in northern Serbia. He is the author of the novels Black Shoes, The Backbone of the Night, and Splinter. Some of his fifty crime, horror, and science fiction short stories were published in his collection The Tales of Mystery and Magic. He has translated, into Serbian, numerous Jonathan Lethem books. His latest book is a children’s mystery, How I Became a Detective. He lives in Belgrade with his wife and daughter.

Nada Petković is an instructional professor at the University of Chicago. A native of Belgrade, she joined the Slavic Department in the late eighties and prefers to refer to herself as Yugoslav. Her projects include the book Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, coedited with Philip V. Bohlman, and the reader Po naški through Fiction. She is the recipient of honors and awards from the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.

Mirza Purić is a literary translator, a contributing editor at EuropeNow, and a former editor at large at Asymptote. His book-length translations include works by Nathan Englander, Michael Köhlmeier, and Rabih Alameddine. In 2019, Istros Books published his translation of Faruk Šehić’s novel Under Pressure. His cotranslation, with Ellen Elias-Bursać, of Miljenko Jergović’s Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah will be published by Archipelago Books.

Ena Selimović, born in Belgrade, spent much of her childhood in Turkey before migrating to the US in 1998. She is completing her PhD in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research brings a comparative approach to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century US and Balkan literatures, with an interest in establishing their interimperial, racialized, and multilingual network in the historical longue durée.

Goran Skrobonja is one of the leading genre authors in Serbia. He was born in Belgrade in 1962. His publishing and translation work introduced modern horror literature to Serbian readers in the 1990s — books by Stephen King, Clive Barker, and James Herbert. His first horror novel, The Brood, was published in 1993, and he went on to publish several story collections and novels, including his best-selling title, The Man Who Killed Tesla.

Dejan Stojiljković was born in 1976 in Niš, in southern Serbia. His book Constantine’s Crossing was a hugely successful, riveting, multigenre novel. That was just the first in a long line of releases that have won prestigious literary awards and critical accolades. Stojiljković has also written several comic scripts and a collection of essays on comics. His writing style spills from fantasy to horror and everywhere in between.

Jennifer Zoble translates literature from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Spanish. Her translation of the short story collection Mars by Asja Bakić was published by Feminist Press in 2019. She received a 2018 NYSCA grant for her translation of Zovite me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić. She’s an assistant clinical professor in the Liberal Studies program at NYU, coeditor of InTranslation at the Brooklyn Rail, and coproducer of the international audio drama podcast Play for Voices.

Vule Žurić is a Serbian writer who was born in 1969 in Sarajevo. He is the author of eleven novels, seven short story collections, and also writes for screen and radio. He has won several major Serbian literature prizes, including the Ivo Andrić Award for Best Book of Short Stories in 2015. He lives in Pančevo, near Belgrade.

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without my friend Tamara Jorgovanović. It was she who gave me the idea to contact Akashic Books. After several years and numerous e-mails, Johnny Temple and Johanna Ingalls finally agreed — and I am very grateful for their support and courage to enter this unknown territory. I owe a special gratitude to Professor Tatjana Aleksić, Eric Eaton, and Rachael Daum for their painstaking efforts to help me polish this collection of stories. I am dedicating this book to my parents, sister, niece, and my friends, who have always been by my side.