Angels Beneath the Surface

With a per capita publishing rate of more that three times that of the United States, Slovenia has a long and storied literary history, from the legendary 9th-century Freising Manuscripts to postmodern masterpieces by Igor Bratoz. Continuing that tradition, Angels Beneath the Surface, the first collection of Slovene fiction to be published in English outside of Slovenia since 1994, offers a rich sampling of Slovene short stories. The thirteen tales here represent a wide array of voices and writing styles among the country's renowned–and emergent–writers.

Written between 1990 and 2005, the selections in Angels Beneath the Surface together comprise a vivid snapshot of Slovene literary consciousness at the turn of the millennium. These authors mine their culture for often startling insights in stories that range from wicked variations on fairy tales to dour romances to skewerings of the bureaucratic state.

Recent articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other prominent publications attest to renewed interest in European literature in translation, and this collection is an incisive entry in the genre.

Editor Mitja Cander studied comparative literature at the Faculty of Art, Ljubljana University. Between 1995 and 2000 Cander was the editor of the literary supplement of the Maribor literary magazine, Dialogi; since 1996 he has been editor of Slovenia’s leading literary press, Beletrina. He received the Stritar Award (1998) for the best young critic and the Glazer Prize (2000) for his cultural contributions to the city of Maribor.

Co-editor Tom Priestly, a graduate of Downing College, Cambridge, received his PhD from Simon Fraser University in 1970. In 1992 he retired with over twenty-two years experience teaching Russian and Slavic Linguistics from the University of Alberta. He is fluent in Russian, German, French, and Slovene languages, and is the author, co-author, or translator of dozens of scholarly books on subject ranging from Russian pronunciation rules to the history of the Slovene minority in Carinthia. Mr. Priestly lives in Canada with his wife and has two children.