Miloš was suddenly confronted with a truth that he had always suspected somewhere deep down. The man inflicting the harm, reponsible for the violence, was his father. He looked as indifferent as he did at the breakfast table. A man without humanity who could take a life as nonchalantly as he might sip a whiskey.
Years of Xenonautical strategic thinking kicked in. Miloš called up a GIF of talking lips on a white background and lit up the screen with them. He also filtered his voice through an alien distorter. “Gvero! Your actions are being monitored in real time. Desist now! Failure to do so will result in the Supreme Intergalactic Court ordering your immediate liquidation. The court is already considering its verdict in the case of the death of Dragana Gvero.”
Miloš’s father gaped at the screen — baffled, terrified. He dropped the Comrade Tito statue, which hit the floor with a thud, narrowly missing Katarina, who had also turned her eyes to the screen, as bewildered as her attacker. Without even glancing down at her, Gvero ran out of the room and a moment later Miloš heard what he assumed was the front door open.
The lips continued, “Thank you, Katarina, for your courageous role in ensnaring the defendant.” The lips morphed into a big eye. It winked.
Miloš walked into the kitchen to brew a cup of tea. As he sat back down at his laptop, he thought, How on earth can I follow that? Within three hours, he had cleared the entire Middle East of aliens.
Mission complete.
About the Contributors
Vladimir Arsenijević was born in 1965 in Pula, Croatia. His first book — In the Hold, an antiwar novel — won the 1994 NIN Award and was translated into twenty languages. Since then, Arsenijević has published numerous novels, graphic novels, and essay collections. He is the founder and president of Association KROKODIL that runs one of the most distinguished literary festivals in the former Yugoslavia. He lives and works in Belgrade.
Muharem Bazdulj was born in Travnik, Bosnia, in 1977. His novels, essays, and short stories have appeared in twenty languages. Three of his books have been translated into English and published in the UK and US: The Second Book, Byron and the Beauty, and Transit, Comet, Eclipse. He lives in Belgrade.
Jamie Clegg is a PhD student of comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is interested in contemporary Diné (Navajo) poetry and histories, and modern Palestinian literature. She translates from Arabic and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Verica Vincent Cole is a crime writer whose novels introduced to readers Belgrade’s first fictional private detective. Cole was born in Belgrade, where, prior to moving to Malta in 1999, she had her own practice as an attorney. After obtaining her degree in international maritime law at the IMO International Maritime Law Institute, she stayed to work at the Institute. She lives in the old city of Rabat, Malta, with her husband Kenneth and their two dogs.
Rachael Daum received her BA in creative writing from the University of Rochester and MA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University; she also received certificates in literary translation from both institutions. Her original work and translations have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Two Lines, EuropeNow, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Daum is the communications and awards manager at the American Literary Translators Association and lives in Cologne, Germany.
Mirjana Đurđević was born in Belgrade in 1956. She has published seventeen novels, as well as several short stories and essays. Her novel Deda Rankove riblje teorije (Grandpa Ranko’s Fish Theories) won the Female Pen Award in 2004. For her novel Kaya, Belgrade and the Good American, she received the prestigious Meša Selimović Award for the best book in the region in 2009. Her works have been translated into English and Slovenian.
Sibelan Forrester is a professor of Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her translations include Irena Vrkljan’s lyrical autobiography The Silk, the Shears and Marina, Milica Mićić Dimovska’s novel The Cataract, and a book of selected poetry by Marija Knežević, Tehnika Disanja (Breathing Technique).
Aleksandar Gatalica was born in 1964 in Belgrade. He graduated with a world literature degree in Ancient Greek from the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Philology. He is a writer, critic, and translator, best known for his novel The Great War, winner of the NIN Award for Best Serbian Novel of the year. His works have been translated into more than ten languages.
Misha Glenny is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. His best-selling nonfiction book McMafia was translated into thirty-two languages and was broadcast as a BBC and AMC fictional TV drama series. A former BBC Central Europe correspondent, Glenny won the Sony Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcasting for his work during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His books include The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–2011 and The Fall of Yugoslavia.
Vesna Goldsworthy was born in Belgrade in 1961 and has lived in England since 1986. She is a best-selling writer, academic, and broadcaster. Her books have been translated into twenty-three languages. Her novel Gorsky, serialized on the BBC, was a Waterstones’s Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2015. Monsieur Ka, which imagines the life of Anna Karenina’s son, was a London Times Summer Reads for 2019.
Kati Hiekkapelto was born in 1970 in Oulu, Finland, and has lived in Kanjiža, Serbia. She is a crime writer, punk singer, and performance artist. The protagonist of her novels is Detective Anna Fekete, a Hungarian born in Serbia who fled to Finland as a child during the Yugoslav Wars. Her novels have been translated into fifteen languages, and in 2015 she won the Clew of the Year Award, presented by the Finnish Whodunnit Society for the best Finnish crime novel of the year.
Milorad Ivanović is a Serbian investigative reporter and editor. He was editor in chief of the Serbian edition of Newsweek, and executive editor of the daily paper Blic and the weekly publication Novi Magazin. Presently he is an editor at BIRN Serbia in Belgrade. He has a special interest in cross-border journalism and is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His investigations have included work on human trafficking, Balkan mercenaries in Iraq, and clinical trials.
Miljenko Jergović was born in 1966 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He published his first article in 1983, and his first book of poetry, Warsaw Observatory, in 1988. He has written several collections of short stories and a dozen novels. In 2012, he received the Angelus Central European Literature Award and in 2018 he won the Georg Dehio Book Prize. His stories and novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Jergović currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.