List Price: 49.95*

* Individual store prices may vary.

Schieber’s Present Past, like her previous Soundless Roar, is a multi-genre collection.  Made up of drawings, poems, and stories, this manuscript confronts the reader with radically different responses to and representations of her rich life.  These materials—most obviously the stories—cover decades, starting with her childhood in 1930s Novi Sad and ending in 1980s Chicago.  In terms of pure space, Schieber’s stories dominate the collection.  At the same time, their content—along with Schieber’s approach to prose narrative—is productively complicated by appearing interspersed between the other forms.  This is, in short, a fascinating collection, one containing many virtues.

“In these pages, Schieber is a captivating person—both as a protagonist and as the artist responsible for the collection itself. Her poetry, drawings, and prose share a stark quality, one that touches on many senses of the word: sharp, severe, blunt, simple, and striking. This starkness is powerful in and of itself, but it is especially potent in the context of the Holocaust—a subject that often seems to resist such direct, unadorned responses.”
—Todd Hasak-Lowy, author of Somewhere There is Still a Sun

Born in Novi Sad near Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Ava Schieber is the author ouf NUP's best-selling Soundless Roar.