It is my pleasure to announce the publication of the English translation of Miloš K. Ilić’s debut novel, The Children of Neverville translated by John K. Cox. The book is published as a collaboration between The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota Quarterly. 

The Children of Neverville is a serious and tragic novel about young people in an exploding country. Set in 1990s Serbia, we see Rambo, a teenager in a medium-sized city, wrestling with the pressures of school, the generation gap, sexuality, life under sanctions, and, above all, his role as leader of a gang called the Centrals. The author, Miloš K. Ilić, deftly captures the big personalities of Rambo’s fellow students and fellow gang members as they challenge authority, balance the demands of friendship with their own fear and desire, and engage in an ominous arms race with other nearby “teams” or “crews” of young people. Written with pronounced cinematic sensibility, in the end we are faced with two material objects of vast significance in the supposedly limited but actually highly nuanced world of these young people: a bitterly contested bandana and a gun brought onto the school grounds.

As with all books from The Digital Press, The Children of Neverville is available as a free download or as a low cost paperback. Buying a copy of the novel in paperback form helps The Press continue its work in the future. To download a free copy go here. To see the rest of the books published in collaboration with NDQ go here.

The full media release is below the fold.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A “Masterful” New Novel Published by North Dakota Quarterly:
Miloš K. Ilić’s The Children of Neverville translated by NDSU Professor John K. Cox

The school yards, neighborhoods, apartment blocks, and abandoned lots are the backdrop to a novel about how young people survive in an exploding country. In 1990s Serbia, Rambo, the teenage leader of a gang called the Centrals, wrestles with the pressures of school, the generation gap, sexuality, life under sanctions, and control over the streets in his medium size city. North Dakota Quarterly and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota are pleased to announce the publication of Miloš K. Ilić’s debut novel, The Children of Neverville. Ilić presents an original, gripping, and heartbreaking allegory for our fragmenting world.

John K. Cox, the novel’s translator and Professor of History at North Dakota State University describes the book’s pace and conversation as “masterful” and locates the novel in the tradition of The War of the Buttons (originally published in French in 1912 as La Guerre des boutons by Louis Pergaud), William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Paul Street Boys (originally published in Hungarian in 1906 as A Pál utcai fiúk by Ferenc Molnár).

To Cox The Children of Neverville reads “almost reads like the movie it should become someday. The characters are sketched realistically, simply, memorably (that is, quirks and all), and often, a bit endearingly. But the main reason I wanted to translate it is because it addresses a number of contemporary themes relevant to all of us. The most prominent theme, from a re-reading of the book today, strikes me as the difficult legacy of the divisiveness and violence we are saddled with from historical events, and, even more so, from very recent ones. Awareness, or sympathy is the reader’s take-away from this, not a happy ending, but the lessons are there if we want them. I think we need them.”

Cox goes on to explain that the novel’s author, Miloš K. Ilić “has written in almost every genre, winning several prizes, employing several pseudonyms, and occasionally provoking controversy. His personal love of film, above all Yugoslav movies from the Tito era, lends his writing a definite cinematic sensibility.”

This novel is the fourth book published by North Dakota Quarterly in collaboration with The Digital Press. The editor of NDQ, William Caraher, of UND’s Department of History, explains: “The goal of this series and of these efforts is to introduce readers to new authors, works, and voices in accessible open access formats. Even amid all the distractions of the 21st-century world, there is something compelling about the prospect of a free book. We hope that this compulsion puts phenomenal, and important, works like The Children of Neverville into the hands of appreciative readers.”

As with all books published by The Digital Press, The Children of Neverville is available as a free download or as a low-cost paperback. Get a copy of the book here: https://thedigitalpress.org/neverville/