Overview
Outside of Croatia, Robert Perišic is best known for his novels, but short stories are what first garnered him recognition, and eventually led him to be considered one of Croatia's most important contemporary voices. Horror and Huge Expenses is a career-spanning collection of stories that demonstrate why Perišic's wryly incisive prose, able to hit so many registers, resonates with readers everywhere. From the frontlines of tragic ethnic conflicts to capturing the hilariously absurd realities of globalism, Perišic unapologetically renders failure and loss, so often finding aching beauty in both, by pulling readers into the stray thoughts and moments upon which all of our lives are built, whether we realize it or not.
Reviews
"Robert Perišic is a light bright with intelligence and twinkling with irony, flashing us the news that postwar Croatia not only endures but matters." —Jonathan Franzen on Our Man In Iraq
"Robert Perisic depicts, with acerbic wit, a class of urban elites who are trying to reconcile their nineties rebellion with the reality of present-day Croatia. . . . The characters' snide remarks could easily sound cynical but the novel has a levity informed by the sense of social fluidity that comes with democracy." —
The New Yorker on
No-Signal Area “
No-Signal Area is a mind-blowing read—a story of crime and heroism in the real-life aftermath of an all-white race war, told with wisdom, sophistication, and passion.” —Nell Zink
“In Perisic’s poignant telling, the erasure of Yugoslavia and its socialist experiment continues to haunt its people, exes now adrift in a postwar vacancy. This void may be familiar to any reader who no longer feels connection to the divided, damaged nation he or she inhabits.” —
New York Times "Absurdity permeates
Horror and Huge Expenses, an excellent collection of tragicomic short stories . . . Throughout the collection, characters grapple with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the violent madness of ethnic nationalism and war, and the chaos of creating new countries and new economies." —Kent Kosak,
Asymptote"Perišić deploys a dizzying range of protagonists drawn from all walks of life, and he has an unrivalled ear for dialogue . . . When it comes to evoking the vast panorama of Croatian life, Perišić has few rivals." —Jonathan Bousfield, writer for the
Rough Guides, Time Out Croatia, and
Jutarnji list“Robert Perišić’s absurdism is perhaps best appreciated in a moment such as the one we live in, the ordinariness of familial connections cataloged in wartime, between bombardments, a woman running with a wheel of cheese, a father paralyzed by trauma. Everyone, at least on the surface, still intact.”--Jai Chakrabarti, Author of
A Play for the End of the World, winner of the Jewish Book Council Debut Fiction Prize
Author Biography
Robert Perišic was born in 1969 in Split, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. In 1988 he moved to Zagreb, where he studied Croatian literature and stayed on to live as a freelance writer. He has tried his skill in various literary forms: novels, short stories, poetry, and dramas. His most widely translated works are the novels Naš covjek na terenu, 2007 (Our Man in Iraq, 2013) and Podrucje bez signala, 2014 (No-Signal Area, 2020), whose English-language editions received critical acclaim, especially in the US. Will Firth was born in 1965 in Newcastle, Australia. He studied German and Slavic languages in Canberra, Zagreb, and Moscow. Since 1991 he has been living in Berlin, where he works as a translator of literature and the humanities. From 2005–07 he translated for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Firth is a member of professional associations in Germany (VdÜ) and Britain (Translators Association). His best-received translations of recent years have been Aleksandar Gatalica’s The Great War, Faruk Šehic’s Quiet Flows the Una, and Robert Perišic’s Our Man in Iraq.
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