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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.
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Reviews
"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. ... Novakovich expertly probes the minds of the virtuous, the menacing, and the self-deluded in equal measure. ... These stories manage the impressive feat of blending gritty realism with more su
Kirkus Reviews
"For more than two decades, Josip Novakovich has been an unflinching and unsentimental observer of the cruelty that one human can afflict on another, penning strange but fully recognizable stories and essays about such bleak topics as nationalism, war, and genocide. Novakovich has always balanced misery with a lightness, with a sense of humor and irony that Italo Calvino says we need to lift us up
Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back
"Novakovich knows how to tell a story, and his prose has an easy, elegant velocity."
The New York Times