A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the "big picture" will inevitably overlook the essential . . . [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."

The Doors of No Return is Boris A Novak’s magnum opus, a verse epic consisting of three books – Maps of Nostalgia, The Time of the Fathers, and The Dwelling Places of Souls, comprising 45,000 verses on 2,300 pages of the original edition. Each book is a world of its own and can be read separately, but they are connected by the same protagonists and stories, shown from three different perspectives; together they form a higher and broader totality. This edition contains selected fragments of the epic, translated by the author with Michael Biggins. Maps of Nostalgia is an atlas of memory, a gigantic geography of the places where the poet or his ancestors have lived, that they have touched, and that they have abandoned and lost. The Time of the Fathers is the epic core of Novak’s “poetic madness” telling the tragic stories of his ancestors. The narrative framework of The Dwelling Places of Souls is tan ocean voyage to the North; where the ship’s cargo turns out to be Souls, Memory, History and its essence – a Story ...