{"product_id":"omer-pasha-latas-isbn-9781681372525","title":"Omer Pasha Latas","description":"\u003cb\u003eA sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eOmer Pasha Latas\u003c\/i\u003e is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo, where  Muslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining a  common resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier,  commander in chief of the Sultan’s armies, and as the book begins he  arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo’s landowners to  heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and  efficiency. And yet the seraskier’s expedition to Bosnia is a time of  reckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a  subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his  father’s financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam.  Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits,  adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever  he goes he remains a stranger. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIvo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961, is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist, and here, in his final novel, he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters, lost souls and hopeless dreamers all, in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. \u003ci\u003eOmer Pasha Latas\u003c\/i\u003e combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth’s \u003ci\u003eThe Radetzky March\u003c\/i\u003e with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.“Andrić possesses the rare gift in a historical novelist of creating a period-piece, full of local colour, and at the same time characters who might have been living today.” —\u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The historical context will be unfamiliar to most readers, but the issues, of good and evil, identity and fate, are universal.” —\u003ci\u003eKirkus \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eIvo Andrić \u003c\/b\u003e(1892–1975) was born to Catholic Croatian  parents in a village in Austrian-occupied Bosnia. His father died when  he was two, and his mother sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in  Višegrad, a town on the Drina River near the Serbian border. In high  school, he began writing poetry and joined Young Bosnia, a student  revolutionary movement advocating South Slav unification. Andrić  enrolled at the University of Zagreb in 1912, where he continued working  with South Slav nationalist groups, then transferred to the  University of Vienna, and later to the University of Kraków, all the  while publishing poems in Bosnian journals and anthologies. Upon the  assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, Andrić, an associate  of Gavrilo Princip, returned to Bosnia and was quickly arrested by  Austrian police. Over the course of World War I, while in prison and  later under house arrest, he wrote a number of prose poems that were  published in two collections after the war, \u003ci\u003eEx Ponto\u003c\/i\u003e (1918) and \u003ci\u003eNemiri\u003c\/i\u003e (Unrest, 1920). In 1919, Andrić was appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the new Yugoslavian government, and served as a diplomat in the Vatican, Bucharest, Trieste, Paris, Madrid, and,  finally, as the ambassador to Germany, a post he held at the outbreak of  World War II. Refusing the German government’s offer of safe passage to  Switzerland, he returned to Belgrade, where he spent the war under  house arrest, writing his two best-known novels, \u003ci\u003eNa Drini ćuprija\u003c\/i\u003e (\u003ci\u003eThe Bridge on the Drina\u003c\/i\u003e) and \u003ci\u003eTravnička hronika\u003c\/i\u003e (\u003ci\u003eBosnian Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e), which were published in 1945. \u003ci\u003eThe Bridge on the Drina\u003c\/i\u003e would go on to become required reading in Yugoslavian high schools, and  Andrić would become a celebrity in Communist Yugoslavia. He was named  the president of the Yugoslavian Writer’s Union and in 1950 was  appointed a deputy in the National Assembly of Yugoslavia. In 1958, he  married Milica Babić, a costume designer twenty years his junior, and in  1961 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Babić died in 1968,  and Andrić lived alone in an apartment in Belgrade until his death in  1975. His funeral was attended by ten thousand people, and his former  apartment was converted into a museum. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eCelia Hawkesworth\u003c\/b\u003e has translated nearly forty books from the Serbo-Croatian, including \u003ci\u003eBosnian Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e by Ivo Andrić; \u003ci\u003eThe Museum of Unconditional Surrender\u003c\/i\u003e by Dubravka Ugrešić; \u003ci\u003eBelladonna \u003c\/i\u003eby Daša Drndić, which was short-listed for the Oxford Weidenfeld prize in 2018; and \u003ci\u003eAdios, Cowboy\u003c\/i\u003e by Olja Savičević. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003eWilliam T. Vollmann\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of three collections of stories, more than ten novels, and many more volumes of nonfiction. His novel \u003ci\u003eEurope Central\u003c\/i\u003e won the National Book Award in 2005, and he has won the Whiting  Foundation Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award for his fiction.  In 2018, he published a two-volume investigation into climate change, \u003ci\u003eCarbon Ideologies\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300947349733,"sku":"NP9781681372525","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681372525.jpg?v=1767734071","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/omer-pasha-latas-isbn-9781681372525","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}