Bargains! PROMOTIONS
Erica Debeljak lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia with her husband Ales and her three children. Born in San Francisco in 1961, she moved to New York City where she attended college and graduate school before pursuing a career in international finance. In 1991, she fell in love with Ales Debeljak, quit her job to make a new life in a new country. Unable to pursue her career in Slovenia where bureaucratic hurdles blocked the way, she learned the language, became a Slovenian/English translator, and eventually took up work as a writer and columnist. Her essays and stories have recently appeared in Glimmer Train (winner of 2007 Family Matters Contest), Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Nimrod, Epoch, Common Knowledge, Context, and Eurozine. Her work has been translated into over five languages. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and has published three books in Slovenia, including Foreigner in the House of Natives.
A caught-between-two-worlds memoir by an American who married a Slovenian and now lives in Ljubljana.After meeting her black-haired Slovenian poet at a party in Brooklyn in 1991, the author resolved to renounce her life as a financial analyst in New York, marry him and live in Slovenia, which had been a republic of Yugoslavia until after the Ten Day War with the Yugoslav army in 1991. Ale' Debeljak had just won a prestigious national poetry award and wanted to move back permanently to his newly independent country. When the author first told them about her decision, her family, friends and colleagues thought she was crazy, a sentiment driven mostly by their utter ignorance about the country. Ensconced in Ljubljana, the picturesque capital designed by Jo e Plecnik, Debeljak attended language school - her rendering of vernacular vocabulary is quite funny - occasionally went out at night with Ale' to one of the city's three bars, became thoroughly acquainted with the stultifying maze of bureaucracy and, when she became pregnant, was confronted with a slew of superstitious beliefs she was powerless to resist. However, she gradually came to love her husband's forest-filled homeland and its many fractured identities. Though the story is now dated more than 15 years, it serves as a touching record of the mores of a country that remains a strange, unknown land to most Western readers.Witty and warm. (Kirkus Reviews)
