Fox

April 17, 2018
novel | pb | 308 pgs
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-940953-76-2

Winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature

Best Book of 2018 at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and the New Statesman

"An astonishingly perceptive, elegantly witty, utterly original exploration of the age-old question ‘How Do Stories Come About.’"
—Alberto Manguel

With characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, notions of betrayal, and the randomness of human lives and biographies. 

Using the duplicitous and shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over and over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha dorothea dorothea butterfly after the woman who drove him cross-country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown and find love to magical effect. 

Propelled by literary footnotes and “minor” characters, Fox is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that’s impassioned, learned, and hilarious. (Read an Excerpt)

Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać & David Williams

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About the Author: Dubravka Ugresic is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, along with six collections of essays, including Thank You for Not Reading and Karaoke Culture, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. She has won, or been shorlisted for, more than a dozen prizes, including the NIN Award, Austrian State Prize for European Literature, Heinrich Mann Prize, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Man Booker International Prize, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2016, she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (the “American Nobel”) for her body of work.

About the Translators: Ellen Elias-Bursać has been translating fiction and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including novels and short stories by David Albahari, Dubravka Ugresic, Daša Drndić, and Karim Zaimovič. She is co-author of a textbook for the study of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian with Ronelle Alexander and author of Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War, which was awarded the Mary Zirin Prize in 2015.

David Williams is the author of Writing Postcommunism, and translated Ugresic’s Europe in Sepia and Karaoke Culture.

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“a betrayal of the reader’s deep urge to categorize and pigeonhole. . . . You can’t pin her down, and that’s her game.” 
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Ugresic’s attachment to absurdity leads her down paths where other writers fear to tread.”
—The Independent (UK)

“It is a book of ideas, of losses, of love and sorrow, of wars and migration: it is a book, in other words, perfect for our 21st century.”
—Micheline Marcom