Ivan Antić
Membranes, membranes
Cultural Center of Novi Sad, 2016
The book Membrane, Membrane is comprised of eight short stories whose topics range from contemporary art and sexual minorities to emigration and different forms of violence in everyday life. It has had an exceptional critical reception and has been included on several best book lists in 2016.
Read story Squeesing-out (Translated by Uroš Tomić)
Ivan Antić (Jagodina, Serbia, 1981) is the author of two collections of short stories, Tonus (2009) and Membrane, membrane (2016). Literary critics consider Antić to be one of the most important prose writers of the younger generation in the contemporary Serbian literature. His stories have been translated into several languages (English, German, Polish, Albanian, Slovenian, Macedonian and Romanian) and included in Serbian and international anthologies.
Best Book Lists
Membrane, membrane is Antić’s second book. It is comprised of eight short stories and isn’t supposed to be read at one fell swoop.
It was included in the daily newspaper Politika’s Overview The Best Books of 2016 as one of the ten outstanding titles from the entire annual prose work production:
“In his new book of stories, Ivan Antić creates a unique language texture. Stories of different length and subject matter have a common denominator which is recognizable in the voice of the narrator and his specific position in relation to the world he describes. Methods employed by Antić in his first collection of short stories Tonus have been developed further in his second book.”
In her review of the younger generation of authors 20 ispod 40 (20 under 40), literary critic Dragana Stolić writes:
“Membranes brings a carefully formulated sentence, enriched with intertextual connections and dispersive meanings. The reader faces a challenging task of slowing his or her reading down and getting involved in a distinctive methodology of observation used by the narrators. This methodology implies a minute scrutiny of people, occurrences, and relationships, analysis and consideration of the obtained ʻresultsʼ.”
Membrane has also been included on the list of most important books of the year 2016 called The Indiscreet Heroes, signed by the literary critic Marjan Čakarević, as well as on the list of most interesting titles of domestic and translated literature in 2016 on the TV show Babylon on Serbian Broadcasting Corporation, edited and hosted by the literary critic Jasmina Vrbavac.