VIDEO | With Kalina Maleska in the high zone of literature

Kalina Maleska / Morning briefing
Kalina Maleska / Morning briefing

"Skopje in the High Zone" is the title of the fourth collection of short stories by Kalina Maleska, which she says she wrote in the past four - five years and are divided into four cycles and they happen in the near future, or in the past and they are all connected with Skopje.
One of the elements that characterizes these stories is humor.

"I try to introduce criticism through self-criticism and self-irony, but also through humor. Usually I want to emphasize self-irony and that is why most of the narrators in the book have some illusions about reality, because I do not like when criticism is directed only at others, if it is exclusively at others it seems to me that we do not always have an idea of ​​our place in the world, how important or unimportant we are, etc. And that is why usually the criticism is directed at the narrator himself, there is also irony and self-parody.
One of the most personal stories is "The Half Marathon Challenge 2017", and in all the others there are personal elements, but in them I build a story with some experimental narrative techniques, but this story is specifically the most autobiographical and almost nothing is invented, in that story it is written exactly as it went, while I was running they came to my mind some problems that we constantly face with the city or some that are not directly related to the city"These can be personal dilemmas, some ambiguities that I clear up while running through the streets of Skopje." says the writer Kalina Maleska for the Morning Briefing.

Otherwise, she is and translator, literary theorist and professor. She is the author of four collections of short stories: Misunderstandings (Makedonska kniga, 1998), Naming the Insect (Slovo, 2008), "My Enemy Itar Pejo" (Ili-Ili, 2016) and the current "Skopje in the High Zone" (again for the same publisher Ili-Ili 2021). There are also the novels "Bruno and the colors" (Slovo, 2006) and "Ghosts with silver threads" (Slovo, 2014), the drama "Incident between events: Hypatia of Alexandria" (Slovo, 2010), the children's book "Arno ama" (Ili-Ili, 2018) and the literary study "Forms of power in contemporary literature" (Ili-Ili, 2020).

Follow the whole conversation in the video

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