A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska
The Queer Syllabus is a joint project from The Rumpus and Foglifter Press that allows writers to nominate works for a new canon of queer literature. When we identify our roots, when we point to the work that shaped us as writers and as people, we demonstrate that our stories are timeless, essential, and important—and so are we. The Queer Syllabus is edited by Wesley O. Cohen and Marisa Siegel.
If a pink water gun is a queering of the gun, then Dimkovska’s book is a queering of the break-up of former Yugoslavia. This novel operates on a metaphor of conjoined twins, Srebra and Zlata (Silver and Gold), who dream of separation, yet they live out their childhoods and young adult lives trying to come to terms with their poverty and grim luck, and thus, destined dependence. The farthest thing from a heteronormative scene, Srebra and Zlata’s experiences politicize borders and their disappearance, in the meantime, radicalizing family life. A book in translation, A Spare Life invites the English language into a new dance and Western culture into a reimagining of daily life. A gem from Eastern Europe.
KAROLINA ZAPAL is an itinerant poet, essayist, translator, and author of Polalka (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). Her second book, Notes for Mid-birth, is forthcoming from Inside the Castle in late 2019. She is collaborating with the poet CA Conrad on translating their book, The Book of Frank, into Polish. Her work has appeared in Flock, The Manhattanville Review, Bone Bouquet, Foglifter, Witness, Bombay Gin, and others. She served as the Anselm Hollo Fellow at Naropa University from 2015-2017. She’s an editor with The Birds We Piled Loosely Press and an appointed Bridge Guard in Štúrovo, Slovakia. Born in Poland and raised in the United States, she wonders about lost cities and impenetrable borders.
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