Selected stories translated into Spanish by Miguel Roán
You can read the stories in Spanish on the portal Balcanismos and the page of Ibero-American studies of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad.
The first book of one of the oldest debut authors in the history of Serbian literature, Death in Bašaid by Miroslav Ćurčić, modernizes the O’Henry model of a short story, craftily executed to perfectionism, with a focus on the final sentences as turning points. Sympathetic and unpretentious losers, loners, weirdos, extraordinarily precisely constituted both psychologically and situationally, move through the narrative world of Death in Bašaid. Successfully using the metaphor of the shopping centre as a consumerist pseudo-paradise, the author places the destiny of seemingly insignificant protagonists in the context of a modern tragicomic nightmare. Effective and unforgettable, Death in Bašaid is also a book of warmth and empathy, an emotionality to which the century in which we live is not particularly prone, while Ćurčić defends himself from any pathos with striking and strange, often grotesque humour.
Miroslav Ćurčić was born in Belgrade in 1966. His short stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. His short story collection Smrt u Bašaidu (Death in Bašaid) and the novels I šampioni umiru, zar ne (Even Champions Die, Don’t They) and U Klivlendu je sve po starom (Nothing New in Cleveland) were published by Partizanska knjiga. He lives in Zemun.
Photo credit: Melanie Siow
Miguel Roán (Vigo, 1981) is a consultant and guest lecturer in different universities and think-tanks with a special interest in the Balkans. He is also an editor of Balkania, the only publication in Spanish that serves as a platform that bridges experts of various backgrounds who specialize in the Balkans. He is the author of four books: Anatomía serbia (2012), Homofobia en los Balcanes (2015), Maratón balcánico (2018) and Balcanismos (2020). He has published articles in different media, such as El País, El Diario, Revista Mercurio or Esglobal and participates regularly in different opinion forums and radio programs to talk about the Balkan region. He has also translated books of award-winning authors such as Ivo Andrić, Faruk Šehić, Dejan Tiago Stanković and Darko Tuševljaković into the Spanish language. His deep interest for the region led him to the co-founding of www.balcanismos.com. He is finalizing his PhD thesis about social movements in the ex-YU space at the University of Valencia.