Belgrade is a place that grows through its own decline, are the words of the famous American writer Jesse Ball, whose hit novel “Self-Portrait” was finally published in our country.
The novel “Self-Portrait” by Jesse Ball was published by the Belgrade publishing house LOM. In between are dynamic and inspired memoirs with associatively connected anecdotes and episodes. The story of the novel begins in New York in 1978, to continue in an unusual mansion in the American state of Mississippi and takes place until 2017.
This novel, “Self Portrait” is the first book of the famous American writer, who was born in New York in 1978, published in the Serbian language.
Ball, according to the American “Star Tribune”, manages to “provide an authentic view of what life is really like, and offers the reader a way to encounter life outside the parameters that society and narrative convention impose on it.”
The culture magazine Frieze assessed that “the dislocated metaflaneurism of the text exudes the spirit of Robert Walzer, and the daydreams create a sense that what the text provides is both deadly serious and completely insignificant”:
According to the Los Angeles Times, Ball showed that he is “a master of style, one of the most ambitious and provocative writers of his generation.”
Jesse Ball, the author of this hit novel, has stayed in Belgrade on several occasions, which, by his own admission, he loves very much.
– Belgrade is a place that grows through its own decline – architecturally, physically, politically, psychologically. People in this town can be cruelly witty in the best possible way, more so than in other places. Most of all, I like to sit in a cafe and read, or wander around the alleys until late at night. The impossible history of this city is like a striking face: it is elegant, daring, tortured, beaten, proud and subtle. No one who has been to this city on the hills can forget it – these are the words of an American writer, whose works have been translated into more than 20 languages, about Belgrade.
Jesse Ball was a recipient of the Guggenheim and Heinz Foundations, Creative Capital, the laureate of the Plimpton literary award, the Berlin Prize and Gordon Burns, and works on the faculty of the Art Institute in Chicago.
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