Published in 2023
224 pages
Asja Bakić is a Bosnian author of poetry and prose, as well as a translator. She was selected as one of Literary Europe Live’s New Voices from Europe 2017, and her writing has been translated into seven languages. Her debut, Mars, was published in English by Feminist Press in 2019. She currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
Jennifer Zoble translates Balkan literature into English. Recent books include Call Me Esteban (Sandorf Passage 2021), her translation of Zovite me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić, and Mars (Feminist Press 2019), which was selected by Publishers Weekly for the fiction list in its “Best Books 2019” issue. She is on the faculty of Liberal Studies at New York University, where she teaches writing and translation.
What is this book about?
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. As she did in her acclaimed debut Mars, Bakić once again upends her characters’ convictions and identities—and infuses each disorienting universe with sly humor and off-kilter eroticism. Visceral and otherworldly, Sweetlust takes apart human desire and fragility, repeatedly framing pleasure as both inviting and perilous.
