Ana Stojanoska

Me and Lin, Afterwards Ana Stojanoska

This is an antinovel, a collage composed of many fragments, an embedded narrative, a metafiction, an autofiction, and a playful work with a nod to magical realism, with a detective story thrown in. Anna Karenina, Vronsky, and Tolstoy make appearances in it. It also includes a positive and matter-of-fact portrayal of a gay character-the first in Macedonian literature. This inventive work zigzags between the narrator's postmortem of the love triangle she was involved in and her attempt to write her first novel. The events of the love triangle are narrated out of sequence, leaving it up to the reader to fit them back together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, while the story of the narrator's novel in progress builds to an intriguing and engaging conclusion. Ana Stojanoska is a writer who delights in experimenting with genre, form, and popular culture influences. She pushes against the boundaries of the novel form, and gives a fresh treatment to the standard love-triangle story-minus the pathos-and the novel-within-a-novel trope. Her work highlights the vibrancy and dynamism of contemporary Macedonian literature and is proof that Macedonian women writers rock.
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