Castle in Romagna Format: Paperback

Alternating between Renaissance Italy and Yugoslavia during the time of Tito, this novel tells two tales of love, intrigue, and betrayal. It is the summer of 1995, the war in Bosnia is raging, and the young Bosnian narrator is taking a tour of an Italian Renaissance castle. He soon finds himself caught up in the two tales of passion and intrigue that his Franciscan guide, a refugee like himself, relates. One is the story of Enzo Strecci, a Renaissance poet from Lombardy who has the ill fortune of falling in love with the wife of Francesco Mardi, his host and protector during a time of Hapsburg incursions and espionage. The other is the story of the Franciscan's own ill-fated passion for the local Communist police commander's daughter during Tito's rupture with Stalinism. Between Rimini, Italy, in 1535 and the Croatian island of Rab in 1948, lives and fates become intertwined, history repeats itself, and nostalgia for home proves itself to be bittersweet.

Igor Stiks is the editor of anthologies of new Croatian prose fiction and international short fiction in English. His fiction, literary criticism, and essays have appeared widely in journals and reviews in the former Yugoslavia. Russell Scott Valentino is the translator of Between Exile and Asylum, Materada, and Persuasion and Rhetoric, and the author of Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Tomislav Kuzmanovic is an MFA student in translation at the University of Iowa. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.