Books
Books by Bеrt Stеin.
Contact brankoprlja@gmail.com if you are interested in publishing the book “3 Minutes and 53 Seconds”
(Translated by Paul Filev; Copyright © Branko Prlja, 2015).
Here’s the full excerpt in PDF.
According to the Google search engine, 3 minutes and 53 seconds is the average duration of a modern song, and for so much time it would take an average reader to read a story from the book. It is a historical analysis not only of music as a reflection of social and political developments in the world and in our country, but also for a wider socio-cultural analysis that operates on three levels. The first level is the local one, which explores the history of these spaces in the concrete period and its correlation with the global events, as well as the personal stories of the protagonists in this book. The second level is the global, through which the author tries to analyze our place amid the world events and how they reflected on our reality. The third level is the individual, i.e. the author’s intimate view of all those local and global events, intertwined with his personal history.
This is a list of songs mentioned in “3 Minutes and 53 Seconds”.
Link to the audio book in Macedonian.
Bert Stein breaks up conventional methods of storytelling again! A novel written as a script or scenario written as a novel? This is Burt Stein’s second work, and in some ways a sequel, or a parallel universe of the one depicted in the first novel, “3 minutes and 53 seconds.” The protagonist enters a “film,” and the film follows his story. This anti-hero on his way to becoming a man of blood and flesh in search of self-knowledge encounters some of the key stories from the world of film, animation and visual art and filters it through his own experience in a kaleidoscopic image that shows us in a way to which only Bert Stein knows. Life is a low budget movie!
