Ismet prcic biography

From the short story Porcus Omnivorus

Mustafa's grandfather was born in a shed. The shed was right next to a puny, derelict house where the rest of his family sat in miserable silence. They were awaiting this newest addition to the already swarming Nalic household with dread. The room was pungent with smoke from a malfunctioning chimney and all of their bellies crackled with need. The first milk from his mother's breast was sparse. When she brought him into the house the family looked at him and saw not a son or a brother but an enemy.

One of their two rooms was larger than the other; it served as a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, a children's room, and, at night, a bedroom. His parents slept in the remaining room unless they had guests over, in which case they would give up their privacy and pile in with the children. There was a single outhouse in the backyard, a little ways from the shed. Two other brothers camped in the shed unless it was wintertime, in which case they too would pile in with the children. One of the older brothers had recently married and found a small, derelict house of his own.

Their father was a pious mason and a spare-time farmer who demanded quiet at all times. He ran his family according to the unwritten code of seniority he'd grown up on, the code of not speaking unless addressed, of politeness to the point of belly-crawling, of always telling the truth even if it meant your death, of never smiling, because others might be miserable, of never crying, because others might be cheerful, of keeping your honor in the community by any means necessary, of saving your best food for guests even when you had to put a piece of glass over a handful of shredded cheese so that the smallest of your children would think they were eating it as they dabbed away at the glass with dry bread. The minutest transgressions would be answered with beatings.

Their mother hardly spoke, would walk ten steps behind her husband and turn away to cry desp

Author: 

Ismet Prcic, Salem, Oregon

Introduction:

Mortiz Müller, HU Berlin, Winner of Southeast Europe Association's Award for the best Master Thesis

Ismet Prcic’s Shards (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, ) reenacts the Bosnian war as a struggle of perceiving presence and absence. The novel uses reiterated and reduplicated sequences to oppose the linear concept of time, to highlight states of in-between: the narrator suffers from dissociation and depicts past, future and present simultaneously. His traumatic conflict is mirrored in the clash of literary forms: fragmented experience, remembrance and oblivion cover up the border between documentation and narration, memoir and novel. While searching for a testifying voice, narrative therapy cannot guarantee truth for the narrative itself stays inconsistent. It rather finds introspective ways to deal with acts of violence and 1. silence, 2. empty spaces in a life’s story or biography 3. the crumbling distinction between reality and fiction. 

Ismet Prcic (Izzy) was born in in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina and immigrated to the U.S. in His debut novel SHARDS was published in by Grove Press to critical acclaim, winning the Best First Fiction Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the LA Times and Oregon Book Awards, and many others. It was a NY Times Notable Book of the Year and has been translated into 10 languages. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film IMPERIAL DREAMS, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and won the audience award in its category. It’s currently showing on Netflix. Prcic lives in Salem, Oregon.

Ismet Prcic is a Bosnian American writer currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He used to be just Bosnian, but then he learned some English and they gave him a piece of paper that said he was now American.

Ismet is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for fiction in His work has appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Bat City Review, Wazee Literary Journal, Prague Literary Review and  Ismet is currently finishing work on his first novel entitled SHARDS, which will be published by Grove, Atlantic early in

In addition to his fiction writing, Ismet is a long-time writer of dramatic works as well as having worked extensively as an actor and director both in the U.S. and abroad. 

Books by Ismet Prcic