Lend Me Your Character

(Paperback)

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From the author of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Thank You for Not Reading

From the story of Steffie Cvek to "The Kharms Case," the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic's collection Lend Me Your Character are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by cliches. She searches endlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare advice from women's magazines and constructed like a sewing pattern. The latter story is one of Ugresic's funniest and is about the strained relationship between a persistent translator and an unresponsive publisher. The stories collected in Lend Me Your Character, the novella "Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life," and a collection of short stories entitled "Life Is a Fairy Tale" solidify Ugresic's reputation as one of Eastern Europe's most playful and inventive writers."

Reviews

"Splendidly ambitious. . . . A brilliant, enthralling spread of storytelling and high-velocity reflections. . . . She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished."--Susan Sontag

"A madcap wit and a lively sense of the absurd. . . . Filled with ingenious invention and surreal incident."--Marina Warner

"Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives the wars in the former Yugoslavia produced. . . . This is an utterly original, beautiful, and supremely intelligent novel."--Charles Simic

Author Bio

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including Fox, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, along with six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work. Celia Hawkesworth has translated The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugresic, Omer-Pasha Latas by Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric, and several works by Dasa Drndic, including EEG, which won the 2020 Best Translated Book Award. Michael Henry Heim was a professor of Slavic languages at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was an active and prolific translator, and was fluent in Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, French, Italian, German, and Dutch.