CAPITAL e-knjiga

This is not a novel, nor is it a book of conventional true stories. This is a bombardment of flashes, quotations, insight, sweet PR seduction on a local and global scale, high calorie columns under that common denominator that was the town of Maribor, during its year-long stint as European Capital of Culture, in 2012. Radical fictional non-fiction with a dash of fictional license, short essays that go well beyond the boundaries of genre and outgrow the scope of a newspaper column. In a column you want to cover the distance from A to B, but Božidar Novak gallops way beyond the whole alphabet: awakening, provocation, sex (according to marketing experts even a mention of the word is a guarantee to increase readership by 200%, something I genuinely wish upon him), social engagement, (self-)irony and evasive criticism. Before us is a book that was not written for the sake of Maribor as the European Capital of Culture, but because of the way we Slovenes – people from Maribor are no exception – are exactly as we wish not to be. Even worse: we are as we least dare to admit we are. In this respect something needs to urgently be done, be it the European Capital of Culture or this book.