Honey in the Carcase: Stories - Softcover

Novakovich, Josip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1945814470 ISBN 13: 9781945814471

Publisher: Dzanc Books, 2019

Synopsis

Both absurd and melancholy, Honey in the Carcase, the newest collection from award-winning Josip Novakovich, moves from scenes as familiar as a dinner party to the brutal landscapes of war-torn Southeast Europe. A man tends bees amid the bombed-out husks of his village. A young girl takes revenge for the loss of a precious life. A Yugoslav drifter finds himself at dead ends in the American heartland. A marriage splinters over a suspicious scent. A cat and a dog enact ancient enmity in the midst of a warzone. An old debt is repaid. And a boy and a juvenile hawk seem to be on a similar quest for freedom and adventure, though violence lurks in the wilds just beyond the window.
Novakovich, hailed as “one of the best short-story writers of the decade” (Kirkus Reviews), approaches each story with the signature insight, wit, and compassion that have brought him distinction as winner of the American Book Award and Whiting Writer’s Award, and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

About this title

About the Author

Josip Novakovich is a Croatian-American writer who resides in Canada. His work has been translated into Croatian, Bulgarian, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Italian, and French, among other languages. He was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 and also received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Fiction, as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Threepenny, Ploughshares, and many other journals, and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He teaches English at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

Review

Novakovich's 14 remarkable stories explore the contemporary state of alienation, both physical and emotional.  In "Charity Deductions," a man identifying himself as "proud to be an American" gets so exasperated by the war in Bosnia he watches coverage of on CNN that he goes to help, in person, leading to unexpected consequences. Every story in this collection  begins with a straightforward statement of premise--"At a Soho pub, David hosted a reunion of his friends from college"--yet his prose is so balanced and apt, with not a superfluous clause or descriptor, that it always lands artfully. This is a haunting, accomplished collection. Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review

Surprises abound in Novakovich's latest collection, which covers the lives of people in Eastern Europe grappling with authoritarianism, internal conflicts, and the pressures within their own communities. These are familiar themes, but Novakovich keeps things unpredictable from the outset: he expertly probes the minds of the virtuous, the menacing, and the self-deluded in equal measure; the ending of "A Variation on a Theme of Boccaccio," in which the narrator realizes he's hardly the hero of his own story, is particularly harrowing. These stories manage the impressive feat of blending gritty realism with more surreal strands, making for a gripping read.Kirkus Reviews.

With his new collection, "Honey in the Carcase" -- which features some of his darkest work and also somehow his most hopeful -- Novakovich once again ranges widely, from Denis Johnson-esque slices of Americana to utterly original tales from various war-torn villages, showing again and again how he is one of our best writers in the English language.    Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times. 

Drastic shifts from the lighthearted to disturbing (sometimes in the physical sense, other times in the cerebral), while they shock and surprise, are an inevitable and necessary driving force behind his 14 stories that provide the reader with characters plucked from everyday life and demonstrate the breadth and elasticity of Novakovich's ability as a master storyteller. Reading each of the stories in Honey in the Carcase is like traveling a winding country highway at night, taking in what the headlights shine upon, never certain of what they will illuminate around the next turn. The Arkansas International.

A useful comparison, however, would be to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer too found the short story congenial, and worked with uprooted figures; for these, he didn't lack affection, but he never lost his shrewd appraisal of their low motives--rather like de Maupassant. That's good company for any storyteller, and by considering the bizarre dislocations of our fractured moment, Novakovich updates the sensibility winningly.  John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail. 

About this edition

• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1945814470
• ISBN 13: 9781945814471
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200