![]() succeeds at writing an unsettling and powerful novel."- The New York Times Book Review "Brilliant. Pushes against convention, logic, chronology. Shards feels like a primary document torn from life by a powerful new talent."-Ron Carlson, author of The Signal and Five Skies, "Impressive. Shards will come to be seen as the definitive novel of the Bosnian war and its resultant diaspora."-Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust The reason this novel is so good, hard, beautiful, and disturbing is that there is more than one Ismet delivering the many sharp pieces. Comparisons to that other Bosnian-American writer, Aleksandar Hemon, will be unavoidable, but Prcic's work is completely and wholly his own. Like fear, it will make you open your ears."-Rae Armantrout, author of Versed A brilliant debut that manages to be both experimental and emotionally resonant. Shards true."- The Oregonian This novel moves at light speed, with shattering immediacy, through the parallel universe lives of two young Bosnian men-who may, in fact, be one person. Ismet Prcic's debut novel Shards is an outsized, outrageous, outstanding performance."-Christine Schutt, author of All Souls "Brutally vivid. ![]() a spirited, soulful talent."- Kirkus Reviews "A passionate heart beats in these pages devoted to the reassembling of a life sundered by war. ![]() Humanity seems to run deepest among those who have survived its near-absence in the world."-Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury and Aliens in the Prime of their Lives "A playful but heartfelt debut. Yet Prcic's sensibility is at once brutally and tenderly comic. This is writing fed by skill, inertia, horror, and sorrow, a survivor's story of triumph and guilt. Shards is an original work of art, brutal and honest, and absolutely unforgettable."-Dinaw Mengestu, author of How to Read the Air Prcic captures the insanity of war and its unceasing aftermath."- Publishers Weekly "Ismet Prcic's prose is a gleaming pinball kept in inexhaustible play, kinetically suspended in time and space, endlessly flung away from its inevitable ending, colliding with memory and invention. Prcic has pieced together a young man's story from the torn and exploded remains of his former life, and the sheer power of his language leaves the reader shaken."-Shelf Awareness "Ismet Prcic has taken apart the complexities of war, love, family and home and scattered them across a novel that is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. Brimming with scraps of memory, regrets, and rationalizations, Shards leaves an indelible scar on the reader's imagination. The writing is packed with one original metaphor after another, language that's almost drunk with colorful, startling images. Tight, glorious little tales-within-tales abound, rattled off with a quick, artless naturalism. With verbal glee, Prcic serves up a darkly comic vision of the terrors and misunderstandings of immigration. Shards is a thrilling read-a harrowing war story, a stunningly inventive coming of age, and a heartbreaking saga of a splintered family. When Mustafa's story begins to overshadow Ismet's new-world identity, the reader is charged with piecing together the fragments of a life that has become eerily unrecognizable, even to the one living it. As Ismet's foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man-real or imagined-named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must write everything." The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet's childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. ![]()
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