"A world without truth would be immensely sad," states the magistrate in the murder trial of local boy, Janek. A young man with serious mental issues, Janek's strange `chestnut crown' - woven from the leaves of a supposedly sacred tree - was found on the body of the farmer Geder; stabbed to death with a bread knife. Through a series of flashbacks during the interrogations, we learn of Janek's story: from the perversion of his relationship with his mother, to the frustrations of his love affair with Daria and his inability to complete his studies or free himself from the ghosts of this past.

A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, "The Master of Insomnia" is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the 'big picture' will inevitably overlook the essential... Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."

My Father's Dreams: A Tale of Innocence Abused, is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia's bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the reader with an eccentric 'bildungsroman' in reverse. Spiced with unusual and original overtones of the grotesque, the history of an insidious deception is revealed, in which the unsuspecting son and his mother will be the apparent victims; and yet who can tell whether the gruesome end is reality or just another dream - This is a novel that can be read as an off-beat crime story, a psychological horror tale, a dream-like morality fable, or as a dark and ironic account of one man's belief that his personality and his actions are two different things. It can also be read as a story about a boy who has been robbed of his childhood in the cruelest way. It is a book which has the force of myth: revealing the fundamentals without drawing any particular attention to them; an investigation into good and evil, and our inclination to be drawn to the latter.

Slovenes, (the people who form ) a nation of two million in the heart of Europe, achieved independence for the first time in their long history with the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. Having settled in the Alps in the sixth century AD, they succeeded in preserving their language, identity and culture largely through poetry and fiction: their greatest national hero is not a general but a romantic poet. With the arrival of independent statehood and membership of the European Union and NATO, Slovenian literature has been freed of its function as the guardian of national identity and is now allowed to explore the realm of literary imagination without the former burdens of attendant duties. While not ignoring their great literary tradition of the past centuries, contemporary Slovenian authors no longer concern themselves predominantly with national issues; their writing is personal, inventive and open outward, even cosmopolitan, yet without losing its specific Central European flavor. The thirteen stories by thirteen leading Slovenian authors selected for this anthology have all it takes to make the reader turn the pages: style, suspense, irony, dark secrets, intellectual game playing, emotional charge, human warmth, and more.