Sweetlust

Asja Bakić, Jennifer Zoble

Description

The eleven stories in Sweetlust interweave feminist critique, intertextuality, and science fiction tropes in an irreverent portrait of our past, present, and future.

In a dystopian world with no men, women are “rehabilitated” at an erotic amusement park. Climate change has caused massive flooding and warming in the Balkans, where one programmer builds a time machine. And a devious reimagining of The Sorrows of Young Werther refocuses to center a sexually adventurous Charlotte.

Asja Bakić deploys the speculative and weird to playfully interrogate conversations around artificial intelligence, gender fluidity, and environmental degradation. Once again Bakić upends her characters’ convictions and identities—as she did in her acclaimed debut Mars—and infuses each disorienting universe with sly humor and off-kilter eroticism. Both visceral and otherworldly, Sweetlust takes apart human desire and fragility, repeatedly framing pleasure as both inviting and perilous.

Sujets

• World Literature
• Humorous
• Science Fiction
• Absurdist
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Date de parution: 14 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781952177736
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise forSweetlust

“Vivid yet nuanced, mysterious and sexy, each one of Asja Bakić’s stories creates its own dangerous universe. This miraculous collection enraptured me again and again.” –CHANA PORTER, author ofThe Seep

“Haunting, funny, and delightfully surreal,Sweetlustfiction into exciting and pushes unexpected realms of imagination. A visceral dive into the perils and pleasures of the human condition.” –ADITI KHORANA, author ofThe Library of Fates

“InSweetlust, Asja Bakić takes on gender, society, literature, climate change, and time travel with such extraordinary ease that one might be fooled into believing such mastery is easy. The narrative is quick and sharp while, almost deceptively, shedding strange and revelatory light on some of the most intimidating subjects of our age. Evocative of the work of Joyce Carol Oates and Leonora Carrington, Asja Bakić—aided by a brilliant translator—delivers a perfectly discordant punch to the gut of matters few dare touch. Truly fearless writing strikes real fear in the heart of a reader, and in this way,Sweetlustis a truly frightful book, and Asja Bakić a singular terror.” –LINA FERREIRA CABEZA-VANEGAS, author ofDon’t Come Back

“Sweetlustand seethes with a rakish energy, part hilarious, part bone-chilling. rollicks Translated brilliantly by Jennifer Zoble, these stories zip back and forth across the centuries. Never a dull moment!” –ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAĆ, translator

Sweetlust Stories by Asja Bakić Translated by Jennifer Zoble

Published in 2023 by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406 New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

First Feminist Press edition 2023

Sladostrašće copyright © 2020 by Asja Bakić English translation copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Zoble Sladostrašće was first published in 2020 in Zagreb, Croatia, by Sandorf Publishing.

All rights reserved.

This book was made possible thanks to a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing February 2023

Cover design by Sukruti Anah Staneley Photo by Siim Lukka on Unsplash Text design by Drew Stevens

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bakić, Asja, 1982- author. | Zoble, Jennifer, translator. Title: Sweetlust / stories by Asja Bakić ; translated by Jennifer Zoble. Other titles: Sladostrašće. English Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York City : The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2023. Identifiers: LCCN 2022044580 (print) | LCCN 2022044581 (ebook) | ISBN 9781952177729 (paperback) | ISBN 9781952177736 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories. Classification: LCC PG1420.12.A345 S5313 2023 (print) | LCC PG1420.12.A345 (ebook) | DDC 891.8/3936--dc23/eng/20220915 LC record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2022044580 LC ebook record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2022044581

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

Cover Praise for Sweetlust Title page Copyright Contents 1998 Gretel Blindness Fellow’s Gully 1740 Mama The Abduction Δάϕνη, or Daphne MCSB Dorica Kastra The Sorrows of Young Lotte Translator Acknowledgments About the Author and the Translator Also Available from the Feminist Press More Translated Literature from the Feminist Press About the Feminist Press

1998

SHE’D PLANNED TO stay home with her mother that summer until her father and sister returned from the European Junior Table Tennis Championships in Italy. Instead she spontaneously took a bus trip to Jablanica Lake with her friend Anida. Anida’s mother was the secretary to the director of the postal service and sent them to a summer camp organized for the children of its employees. She was sixteen. She brought a two-piece bathing suit, teen angst, and the novelI, Tituba, Black Witch of SalemMaryse Condé. She was looking by forward to a perfect summer. When she got off the bus, she realized she’d be sharing a tent with at least six other girls, which didn’t particularly please her since she’d always found it difficult to make friends. She’d spent her life training at table tennis out of emotional obligations and habits, not because she enjoyed the company of others her age. Physical exertion made her feel good, but socializing exhausted her. She tended to expect the worst of people, primarily because players from the other team would always insult their opponents during matches to demoralize and weaken them. She dreamed of fair play, an atmosphere in which she’d be less anxious about losing. She was sensitive, but not in the same way as her peers. Anida, who was slightly younger, adored the film Titanic—she’d seen it at least twenty times. But she didn’t share Anida’s tastes, or even her sister’s. At the entrance to the camp, which was across from a lake, there were picnic tables where everyone ate. The kitchen was there, too, and next to that, a small infirmary. A hill rose above them. She knew right away that she’d spend most of her time up there; she was always looking for an isolated perch from which to study someone else’s upbringing in order to forget about her own. Hordes of children packed into the same place was not an especially pleasant scenario for the organizers either. At times the racket seemed to reach all the way to the Amalfi Coast. But that wasn’t her problem. Like any child, she needed a vacation from her own hormones, from the nightly growth of her breasts, which was driving her crazy. She loved other girls’ tits. For herself she just wanted a straight line to death. On the first day, right after breakfast, she climbed the hill and sat in the shade. Anida was going swimming with her friends and called out to her, of course, to join them. But she turned her down. She only went swimming at dusk, when there was no one left in the lake. She’d been watching them curiously from the hill. They may have shared the same tent, but they clearly didn’t share the same thoughts: the other girls were obsessed with boys, and she couldn’t bring herself to think about them. Still, she would occasionally wonder what she might be missing out on. It was only on the third day that she dared to go in the lake with everyone else. A boy immediately grabbed her leg, wanting to start a conversation. It was a stupid, childish move, but she laughed. He was not repulsive to her. She swam away quickly nonetheless. She experienced swimming differently from table tennis. For her it wasn’t a sport. The nausea she woke up feeling on competition days disappeared in the lake water: she threw it to the muddy bottom with each crawl stroke. With each backstroke she unloaded the burden from her shoulders. Shit! she thought. I’m even competitive about intimate feelings. Everything in her world had become one big sports metaphor. Her muscular body carried her thoughts upstream, away from the tumult. She regarded the other swimmers with curiosity, like someone who had already beaten them at growing up, and at life. It was a sad gaze, but in the spirit of victory, she had to move on. After swimming, she climbed the hill more slowly than usual. She’d brought her book but she didn’t feel like cracking it open. The reason why she hadn’t gone to the European Junior Championships was trivial: the table tennis federation couldn’t afford to pay for her travel as well as that of her colleagues. The two best teenage girl athletes had stayed home. The kids in the younger division had gone; all the boys had gone. And it would’ve been fine (she was used to not having money)