Damir Karakaš and Ellen Elias-Bursać discuss Celebration with Zain Khalid

The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith hosts author Damir Karakaš and translator Ellen Elias-Bursać to discuss and celebrate the release of Celebration with writer Zain Khalid.
With Celebration, Croatian journalist and novelist Damir Karakaš relays an epic in village miniature: the story of a father, a son, a farm, a family dog, and a nation’s descent into fascism.
Mijo, a soldier in the Nazi-allied Ustaša force, has returned to his village at the end of the war. He’s hiding in a hole in the woods, watching as the soldiers who want him dead return again and again to his house, disturbing his wife and children at all hours of the day. If he can just wait long enough, he naively believes, the atrocities of the war and his own involvement in it will be forgotten, and he can have what he really wants: a quiet life farming his land with his family.
How did Mijo become the man we encounter in these pages? By facing poverty? Enduring heartbreak? Nurturing ignorance? Damir Karakaš, a war reporter who witnessed the horrors of the breakup of Yugoslavia firsthand, examines the recent history of an unsettled region in evocative prose, contrasting the beauty of nature against the failings of people. Celebration, translated by the incomparable Ellen Elias-Bursać, traces a dark path-from hapless individual to world-changing catastrophe-in search of a way to break the cycle of political violence.
Hosted by the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, this virtual event was originally recorded on September 14, 2024.
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