davidfcooper

Today Boston and New York publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt releases Serbian-Canadian writer David Albahari's novel Leeches. Albahari is the author of 11 novels and 9 collections of short stories. His previous novel Götz and Meyer, which is about the Shoah, won the ALTA Translation Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover selection. Leeches is written entirely in a single book-length paragraph, a technique Albahari also employed in Götz and Meyer.

In my New York Journal of Books review of Leeches I write: "David Albahari’s challenging yet engaging, cerebral, magical-realist, experimental, post-modernist novel Leeches provides a portrait of life in Belgrade, capital of an ideologically charged and xenophobic Serbia, in the months preceding the NATO bombing campaign. As elsewhere in history, Belgrade’s Jewish community is the proverbial canary in the Serbian coal mine; considering the Serbian government’s behavior toward other former Yugoslav republics and their ethnic groups, this should not be surprising." My review ends with two lengthy excerpts from the novel and challenges the reader to decide for him/herself whether their intellectual content enhances the narrative or is pretentious erudition for its own sake.

For more info: David Cooper