Josip Novakovich

Creative Writing and Literary Arts

 josipn@yahoo.com

Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He has published a novel, April Fool's Day (translated into ten languages), three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Bard, Penn State, and now Concordia University in Montreal.

Shopping for a Better Country, 2012

A collection of narrative essays on family, history, and travel from Croation American Josip Novakovich, a Whiting Writers' Award winner and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Having left his homeland of Yugoslavia, leaving behind kin and community, the author here captures significant portraits of what is lost, what is remembered, and what remains.

Fiction Writer's Workshop, 2008

Fiction Writer's Workshop, Second Edition, is designed to help you foster a strong sense of independence–of being and thinking on your own, of becoming self-evaluative without being self-critical–in order to accomplish what others seek in classroom groups.

Infidelities, 2005

Hailed as one of the best short story writers of the 1990s, Josip Novakovich was praised by the New York Times for writing fiction that has "the crackle of authenticity, like the bite of breaking glass." In his new collection, he explores a war–torn Balkan world in which a schoolchild's innocence evaporates in a puff of cannon smoke, lust replaces love, and the joy of survival overrides all other pleasures.

April Fool's Day, 2004

Ivan Dolinar is a man caught in the crosscurrents of senseless wars, ridiculous dictators, and the usual and unusual difficulties of just trying to get by in the Balkans. His life begins, auspiciously, on April Fool's Day, 1948.

Stories in the Stepmother Tongue, 2000

These stories were written in English by writers who emigrated to the United States. The anthology attempts to explore the question as to why these writers choose to express themselves in a language other than their native tongue. Edited by Josip Novakovich