BOOKS

Ring
by Andre Alexis

With "Ring", Andre Alexis completes the cycle of five novels, beginning with "Pastoral" (2014), continuing with "Fifteen Dogs" (2015, published in Macedonian by Tabahon in 2019), "The Hidden Keys" (2016) and "Days by Moonlight" (2019). Although at first glance this is a love story, the novel is also a sophisticated mediation on the past, in all of its forms. Magical travel through a narrative about honor and the sacrifices that are made in the name of love. Surely, it can be red independently, although the other four books in the series contain subtle clues on its content, almost as cameo appearances in the movies.

The Еtnologist as a Writer: the Writer as an Ethnologist (collection)
by various authors

This book is a result of a workshops held in spring 2020, with students of a number of departments of the Philological faculty and the Institute of ethnology and anthropology, University St. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje. The goal was to focus upon the potential connection between literature and ethnography. Students had a task to creatively "re-read" original archive materials, interviews on different topics, and to write their own works based upon them. The result are these 25 stories, poems, essays and a comic, fictional correspondence and travelogues, that expand the existing ethnographic materials, imagine how it is to be in the shoes of the interlocutors and how their stories end. They examine the fluid line between documentary and fiction, presenting 'truth' as a kaleidoscope of narratives and perspectives.

Fifteen Dogs
by Andre Alexis

Ancient Greek gods decide to give dogs a super-power - to think and speak as humans. However, the stakes are high. The story starts in a bar, where Hermes and Apollo discuss weather the animals would be better off if they would posses human intelligence. They make a bet and what follows is a narrative about human versus animal mind, the beauty and challenges of conscience and the ways in which the worlds of people and animals collide.

The Golden Mean
by Annabel Lyon

A historical novel that imagines the relation between two great persons – the philosopher Aristotle and the warrior Alexander the Great. Based upon historical data, it is however much more than a description of what is already well-known from the textbook pages and encyclopedias. Penetrating deep into the characters, Annabel Lyon in fact examines a conflict between two world-views, one that promotes moderation, and another that finds the sense of life in crossing the limits, and in the passion for discoveries.

Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures
by Wade Davis

For more than 30 years, renowned anthropologist Wade Davis has traveled the globe, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the world’s traditional cultures. His passion as an ethnobotanist has brought him to the very center of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the deserts of North Africa, the rain forests of Borneo, the mountains of Tibet, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti. In Light at the Edge of the World, Davis explores the idea that these distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself and have much to teach the rest of the world about different ways of living and thinking. As he investigates the dark undercurrents tearing people from their past and propelling them into an uncertain future, Davis reiterates that the threats faced by indigenous cultures endanger and diminish all cultures.

Dark Diversions: A Traveler's Tale
by John Ralston Saul

Black humor novel that follows a number of parallel narrations that take us from Paris and New York, through Morocco to Haiti. The author moves in privileged circles on both sides of the Atlantic, peeping in the lives of aristocrats, religious fanatics, as well as dictators and spies. Compared to the great Truman Capote, Ralston Saul's style is so convincing that the novel feels like a first-hand reportage or a travelogue of an unusual traveler.

ANTHROPOLOGIST AS AN AUTOR
by Clifford Geertz

Where is the border between good ethnography and literature? How does the specific style influence the construction of authenticity of their research and our feeling that they were really "there" - among the communities that they describe? Being over-focused upon field work as a defining element of anthropology, we have missed the opportunity to analyze the way in which ethnographic "truths" are being constructed through text. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), one of the most influential anthropologists of the 20th century, in this book examines works of Ruth Benedict, Malinowski, Claude Levy-Strauss and others, attempting to show that the anthropologist is (also) a writer.

THE BURNOUT SOCIETY
by Byung-Chul Han

Stress and fatigue are not only personal experiences, but also social and historical phenomena. Byung-Chul Han, South-Korean author who lives and works in Germany, interprets contemporary epidemic of the burnout syndrome as an inability to face negative experiences in times of overwhelming positiveness and universal availability of people and goods.

THE VITAL GAME
by Ilina Jakimovska

Second book of poetry by Ilina Jakimovska, after "A Sun in a Jar", this time illustrated by her son, Ivan Jakimovski, a young artist from Skopje. ?he drawings were made when he was 4 years old, and the their titles are also his - "An Evil Eyed Parrot", "An Umbrella For the Whole World" or "A Ghost, Not Too Scary". Sometimes funny, sometimes melancholic, this books is a nice family project.

IN SEARCH OF TIME LOST
by Boris Dežulović

A collection of essays, specially selected for the Macedonian edition, written during the last 15 years, of the famous Croatian journalist and writer, one of the founders of the cult satirical magazine Feral Tribune. The essays are in fact a material for an alternative, political and emotional history of the region. The title, a paraphrase of Proust's famous work, follows the style of Dežulović's previously published collections of texts in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia - "Crime and Punishment", "Red and Black" and "War and Peace"

METAPHYSICS
by Aristoteles

"Metaphysics" is considered to be one of the greatest philosophical works. Its influence on the Greeks, the Arabs or the scholastic philosophers was immense. Aristotle’s genius was to reconcile two apparently contradictory views of the world - the result is a synthesis of the naturalism of empirical science, and the rationalism of Plato, that informed the Western intellectual tradition for more than a thousand years. This is the first part of the first translation ever of "Metaphysics" in Macedonian, made by Ierodiacon Victor Metaphrast, who, as in the previously translated "Categories", offers Slavic-based terminology instead of the western one, traditionally used in Macedonian philosophy. It is accompanied by detailed commentary, notations, as well as the original Greek text.

HAYEK VERSUS MARX
by Eric Aarons

An economic and political theorist, Eric Aarons is also one of the key activists of the Communist Party of Australia. In this book he confronts the biographies and intellectual achievements of the two titans of modern political economy – Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek. Parallel to the analysis of their anthropological and economic positions, he tries to apply those upon every-day life and problems faced by our contemporary, globalizing society.

CATEGORIES
by Aristotle

A part of Aristoteles’ “Organon”, this book is published in Macedonian for the first time, in a critical edition, with a parallel text in Macedonian and ancient Greek. It is translated by Ierodiacon Victor Theodorostudit, who at times offers new translation solutions to the philosophical terminology of Aristoteles, based upon Slavic linguistic roots.

OPTIMISM: The Biology of Hope
by Lionel Tiger

An important, pioneering work that refers to the most universal of the human traits: the need to believe that there is an exit, even from the hardest life situations. Is the optimistic attitude genetically inherited, or is it culturally constructed? Combining data from psychology, genetics and anthropology, Lionel Tiger is an optimist – that as long as there are people, there is also hope.

WALDEN
by Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived, says the author of this cult book, which even being written in the 19th century presents an unbelievably precise diagnosis of the problems of our, 21st century. Is it possible to strip away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions? This is a wonderful philosophical and practical guide on the ways to achieve this goal.

THEY HAVE A WORD FOR IT: A LIGHTHEARTED LEXICON OF UNTRANSLATABLE WORDS AND PHRASES
by Howard Rheingold

In this book Howard Rheingold digs into the global linguistic treasure, to discover the most valuable pieces. From the Hawaiian ho’oponopono, the Japanese sabi, to the German Zeitgeist – untranslatable words from different cultures can help you enrich your vocabulary, but also inspire you to learn and implement the concepts that these words presuppose in your every-day life.

THE OTHER SIDE: THEATRE CRITICS AND ESSAYS
by Ilija Upalevski

This book contains critics and essays that this young Macedonian theatre critic has published in a number of daily newspapers and magazines during the last few years. It is important not only as a document for Macedonian theatre memory, but also as a specific model for aesthetical analysis of the local theatrical expression. Putting himself “on the other side” of the scene, Upalevski is rigorously dissecting not only the theatre plays in question, but also the current cultural context.

WAITING FOR MACEDONIA: IDENTITY IN A CHANGING WORLD
by Ilka Thiessen

Ilka Thiessen is a professor of social anthropology at the Vancouver Island University. She started her research in Macedonia by the end of the 1980’s. This book is her doctoral thesis, defended at the prestigious London School of Economics.

Through powerful auto-reflexivity and rich ethnography, she follows the life of a number of young women-engineers, and though them the modifications of the social system, education and politics. Most of all, she deals with the change of identities, at an individual, but also at a collective level.

PIECES OF MOSAIC: AN ESSAY ON THE MAKING OF MACEDONIA
by Jonathan Matthew Schwartz

An anthropological study on Macedonia which, based upon every-day life of the inhabitants of Resen, a town in South-West Macedonia near Prespa lake, offers analysis of the changes that took place in this country from the dissolution of former Yugoslavia, to the first years of its independence.

Schwartz is a professor of social anthropology, an American living and teaching in Denmark. In the 1970’s he became interested in Macedonian diaspora in Copenhagen. Motivated by these contacts, he continued conducting field research in Macedonia, visiting Prespa on numerous occasions. This book is the result of his scientific and personal attachment to this area, which is full of fresh, thick ethnographic description and lively anecdotes.

WHY MAN GAMBLE AND WOMEN BUY SHOES
Secrets behind everyday human behavior
by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa

Why does having sons reduce the likelihood of divorce? Why are most neurosurgeons male and most kindergarten teachers female? Why do females in every culture tend to be more religious than their male counterparts? Why do so many politicians ruin their careers with sex scandals (but only if they are men)?
These are some of the aspects of universal human behavior into which evolutionary psychology has begun to give us insights. The past decade has witnessed an explosion in research on the biological and evolutionary foundations of our behavior. And this new perspective is offering fresh insights into many questions that the social sciences have struggled to answer. Using a lively and engaging question-answer format, and with each chapter focusing on a particular theme of behavior, the authors look the evolutionary reasons for the way we behave, the statistical trends and tendencies, and, of course, the many exceptions too.

A SUN IN A JAR
by Ilina J.

A collection of poems and short stories, this book balances between the metaphysical, ironic and humorous. Part of it has been already published in literature journals and on the author's blog, and perceived by readers as "fresh" and "charming".
Inspired by figures such as musicians Tom Waits and Nick Cave, Polish poet Shimborska, and the employees in her favorite café, this is in fact the author's intimate autobiography.