Новинки Елены

This collection features stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and values that are perceptible only at exceptional moments. The narration moves from apparent realism to other genres, such as crime fiction, the thriller, and erotic prose. Memories, intimations, and premonitions are infused in these stories with a tranquility that accepts what fate brings, even when, as in the stories Pockets Full of Stones or Nosedive, efforts are made to change it. Lengold uses eroticism as a natural ingredient of human life, as an integrated tension consisting of two inseparable aspects—body and soul—energizing stories like Love Me Tender, Fairground Magician, Zugzwang, Wanderings, and Aurora Borealis. Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts. In stories like It Could Have Been Me, Shadow, or Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery, she manages to leap over the wall between the bodily surface and the human interior in a very distinctive way. No matter how common the situations she depicts—whether it be broken marriages, unfulfilled expectations, or the motives of forlorn lovers—Lengold is constantly searching for the authentic, finding it within the sophisticated irony which is a trademark of her fiction.

Vašarski mađioničar je nova knjiga priča Jelene Lengold, čije su prethodne knjige proze privukle veliku pažnju kritike. Vašarski mađioničar donosi priče o ljubavi i žudnji, o gradu i erotici, o svakodnevici i strasti. Pisane sa velikom književnom snagom, ove priče su autentično svedočanstvo o intimi i svakodnevici, o čudima ljubavi i o svakodnevnim epifanijama. Priče Jelene Lengold jesu književnost prekoračenja, književnost koja prevazilazi sve tabue i govori otvoreno i strasno, kakve su i teme ove knjige retke u savremenoj srpskoj književnosti. U pričama iz Vašarskog mađioničara progovaraju svetlosti i senke svakodnevice i intime, veliki i mali obredi privatnosti i ljubavi. Nove priče Jelene Lengold odlikuju se istančanom psihologijom i nekim od najboljih ženskih i muških likova novije srpske književnosti.

In Baltimore, Jelena Lengold offers an exquisite portrayal of a Belgrade writer, a woman in her forties, whose tightly packed, unresolved inner conflicts with herself and the people closest to her led her sobering to a dead end. She is compelled to turn around and look closely at the routine of her everyday life - her marriage, family, friends, loves, lies and the likes. What she finds is a strange mixture of uncertainty and boredom, insecurity and determination which grow into full-blown frustration at sessions with her therapist. The writer's block the protagonist's suffer from a metaphor for a blocked life, a life led in the recesses of reality represented in bouts of silence, web cam voyeurism and Internet flings.
Lengold's prose style - witty, sharp and somber - strikes a resounding tone for telling the truth of one of our lives.