Fairground Magician

by Jelena Lengold, Celia Hawkesworth (Translator)

The collection Fairground Magician brings together stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and values that are perceptible only at exceptional moments. The narration moves from apparent realism to other genres; from crime fiction or thriller to erotic prose. Memories, intimations and premonitions are infused in these stories with a tranquillity that accepts what fate brings, even when efforts are made to change it, as in the stories Pockets Full of Stones or Nosedive.

Lengold uses eroticism as a natural ingredient of human life, as an integrated tension consisting of two inseparable aspects – body and soul – energising stories like Love Me Tender, Zugzwang, Wanderings, and Aurora Borealis. In Fairground Magician, Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts. In stories like It Could Have Been Me, Shadow, or Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery, she manages to leap over the wall between the bodily surface and the human interior in a very distinctive way. No matter how common are the situations she depicts - whether it be broken marriages, unfulfilled expectations or the motives of forlorn lovers - Lengold is constantly searching for the authentic, finding it within the sophisticated irony which is a trademark of her fiction.

Jelena Lengold is a storyteller, novelist and poet. She has published five books of poetry, one novel (Baltimore) and four books of short stories, including Rain-soaked Lions, Lift and Fairground Magician, which won her the European Prize for Literature in 2011. Lengold works as a journalist and an editor at Radio Belgrade.

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153 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2014

About the author

Born on 15 July 1959 in Kruševac, Serbia. She has published eleven books which include six books of poetry, four books of stories and a novel. She is represented in a number of anthologies of poetry and stories, and her works have also been translated into a number of foreign languages. Jelena Lengold has worked as a journalist and an editor in the culture desk at Radio Belgrade. She has afterwards worked as a project coordinator of Nansenskolen Humanistic Academy in Lillehammer, Norway for the subject Conflict Theory. Since September 2011 she has been a freelance artist, dedicated solely to writing as her only profession. For the collection of stories The Fairground Magician she received the following awards: Biljana Jovanović, Žensko pero, Zlatni Hit liber, as well as the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011.