A young journalist sees a man slap a beautiful woman on the shore of the Danube. Intrigued, he follows the woman into the tangled streets of the city until he loses sight of her. A few days later a mysterious package arrives. As he delves deeper trying to decipher the contents, he finds himself unravelling a terrible conspiracy that seems destined to end in tragedy...

Leeches

Literature & Fiction

Albahari, David

Contemporary

Vintage

Götz and Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, are entrusted with an assignment, "not a big one," but one that "requires efficiency." Their task is to transport five thousand concentration camp prisoners, one hundred at a time, in a hermetically sealed truck in which they are gassed. As Albahari's anonymous narrator, a teacher, obsessively pursues the truth of this systematic annihilation, he shares his findings with his students. Their school bus becomes that truck, and as the memory of Belgrade's lost Jewish souls is evoked, the students are bewildered. Their teacher, exhausted as much by the task of making history come alive as by the toll his research has taken on him, is finally overwhelmed by the horror of his own imaginings. A masterfully written story of the mass murder of Serbia's Jews in 1942, full of compassion, irony, and lyricism.

Gotz And Meyer

Elias-Bursac, Ellen

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The place is Serbia, the time is the late 1990s. Our protagonist, a single man, writes a regular op-ed column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking pot and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping a beautiful woman. Intrigued, he follows the woman into the tangled streets of the city until he loses sight of her. A few days later he receives a mysterious manuscript whose contents seem to mutate each time he opens it. To decipher the manuscript—a collection of fragments on the Kabbalah and the history of the Jews of Zemun and Belgrade—he contacts an old schoolmate, now an eccentric mathematician, and a group of men from the Jewish community. As the narrator delves deeper into arcane topics, he begins to see signs of anti-Semitism, past and present, throughout the city and he feels impelled to denounce it. But his increasingly passionate columns erupt in a scandal culminating in murder. Following in the footsteps of Foucault’s Pendulum, Leeches is a cerebral adventure into the underground worlds of secret societies and conspiracy theories.

United States

Mariner Books

Götz and Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, are entrusted with an assignment, “not a big one,” but one that “requires efficiency.” Their task is to transport prisoners from a concentration camp near Belgrade in a hermetically sealed truck, in which they are asphyxiated. The nameless narrator of Götz and Meyer, a Jewish schoolteacher, discovers Wilhelm Götz and Erwin Meyer while researching the deaths of his relatives. Overwhelmed by the horror of his discoveries as they become entangled with his own feverish imaginings, he organizes a class trip. The school bus becomes Götz and Meyer’s truck, and the teacher and his students merge with Belgrade’s lost souls in a sacred act of remembering.

One of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia addresses such universal themes as exile, disorientation, and obsession Displaced from his home more than twenty years ago as Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia descended into war, Serbian author David Albahari found safety in Canada, where this novel was written. In Globetrotter, Albahari deals with the bewilderments of exile and lost identity, themes he has investigated in earlier works. But in this unsettling experimental book he also enters new arenas, where sexual identity and the nature of blame and guilt attract his scrutiny. Narrated in a single uninterrupted paragraph, the novel takes place in the late 1990s at the Banff Art Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Three men—a painter from Saskatchewan and the narrator of the tale, a writer from Serbia, and a man whose traveling Croatian grandfather long ago jotted his name in a local museum’s guest book—become acquainted, then attached, then fatally entangled. On a climactic mountain hike that seethes with jealousy, desire, shame, and guilt, each man must engage in a final struggle. Albahari seizes his reader’s attention and never yields it in this remarkable, gripping tale.

Globetrotter (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Literary

Yale University Press

Words Are Something Else (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed largely outside the canon of Serbian literature, have influenced a generation of Balkan writers. This collection gathers Albahari's best and most important stories, moving from an early preoccupation with the family and Central European culture to metafictional searches for the roots of his identity.

Northwestern University Press

Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and daughter, David Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together to create a multilayered narrative combining a wholly fictional novel with a chronicle of the narrator's visit to the United States. As the fragments accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness.

Tsing (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Bait (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

In self-exile in Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and his mother's death, the narrator of Bait is listening to a series of tapes he recorded of his mother years before. As her story is told, he reflects on her life and their relationship, attempting to come to terms with his Jewishness and his own new life in a foreign culture.

In self-exile in Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and his mother's death, the narrator of Bait is listening to a series of tapes he recorded of his mother years before. As her story is told, he reflects on her life and their relationship, attempting to come to terms with his Jewishness and his own new life in a foreign culture.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Albahari, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Albahari, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Albahari, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Leeches

Gotz And Meyer

Leeches

Gotz And Meyer

Globetrotter (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Words Are Something Else (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Words Are Something Else (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Tsing (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Bait (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

Bait (Writings From An Unbound Europe)