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Nova Istra, a literary and cultural journal, first appeared in the summer of 1996 in Pula and has since been published quarterly. It is one of the leading Croatian journals of its kind, published by the Istrian branch of the Croatian Writers' Union, situated in the fifth largest city in the Republic of Croatia -- Pula. The city is culturally, but also less specifically, the social centre of the Adriatic peninsula Istria, the most western and one of the most developed Croatian Regions.

Nova Istra mostly publishes literary pieces, both by Croatian authors and in translation: prose, poetry, drama, essays, studies, reviews, etc. A culturological approach to contemporary and traditional subject matter is particularly favoured. The journal regularly, or at least often, publishes contributions from other art media: film, visual arts, theatre, music (mostly jazz), in addition to contributions from the social sciences and humanities: philosophy and philosophy of science, history, archaeology, ethnology, etc. Young authors frequently appear on the pages of the journal. However, one of the journal's policies since the first issue has been the aesthetic and generational openness towards permanent contributors and their contributions.Nova Istra, as a culturological project, started its own publishing trade in 1997 (poetry and prose anthologies, bibliographies, translations, collected papers). We would like to single out the Soljan Anthology, a collection of literary-critical and literary-theoretical papers on the most significant and translated Croatian author of the second half of the twentieth century -- Antun Soljan.

Pieces written by the most famous contemporary Croatian authors, alongside many talented young writers, have been published in Nova Istra. We single out the contributions on prominent Croats who have notably enriched the European science and culture of their time, some of them being Rugjer Boikovic, Herman Dalmatin (Hermanus Dalmata), and Matija Vlacic Ilirik (Matthias Flacius Illyricus).

The following contributors' pieces have been translated into foreign languages: Nedjeljko Fabrio, Zoran Feric, Slavko Mihalic, Petar Segedin, as well as the papers on the works of Antun Soljan, Nikola Sop, Tin Ujevic, and others. The journal has in a few volumes published a selection of recent Croatian short stories (The New Croatian Prose).

In the first fifteen years of its publication, 40 issues of Nova Istra have been published, containing among other contributions larger themes, or more detailed pieces on:

- globalization
- (anti)globalization & culture
- identity and contemporariness
- intercultural communication
- poetry of North American Indians
- pluralism of cultures and intercultural understanding
- contemporary Russian short prose
- "spiritual" songs of North American Christians
- contemporary prose of Trieste
- art and ideology
- women's prose in Russia in the 1990s
- surrealism
- bio-ethical discrimination of women
- anti-globalization movements
- Lithuanian literature and culture
- contemporary visual art
- history of women's drama
- extermination of certain nations in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century
- new European drama
- modern Russian unrestricted verse
- contemporary Czech poetry
- contemporary Jewish poetry
- Sam Shepard
- anthology of Kurdish poetry
- modern and post-modern architecture
- city-essay
- how to "read" Europe?
- Danish modernists
- Europeanism and "frontierism"
- the influences of William Blake's poetry on Jim Morrison's rock music
- love (on love)
- against totalitarianism (Stalin, Tito...)
- Ricœur's hermeneutics of imagination
- the authority...
- the historical-dialectical game of escapism and terrorism
- the causes of crisis in modern democratic states
- manipulation
- deconstruction and performativeness of body

In 1998, being thus the first in Croatia, and then in 1999, the journal organized two culturological conferences called "Reading the Signs of Time", which dealt with the turn of the new millennium from the perspective of the arts, humanities, natural sciences, theology, and other fields.

We wish to single out translational literature, in other words essayist and critical approaches to works of many world-famous writers, authors, and thinkers -- both contemporary ones, as well as those whose works, belonging mostly to the western but also to other cultures and civilizations, become in their roots the public good of all people and the common heritage of mankind.

This is why you will come across the Croatian translations of the following authors, or the critical texts, studies, and reviews about them, on the pages of Nova Istra :

Naja Marie Aidt, Alain (Emile Chartier), Vladimir Alejnikov, Monica Ali, Dante Alighieri, Isabel Allende, Yehuda Amichai, Roberto Ampuero, Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, Paolo Badini, Hermann Bahr, Hugo Ball, Alessandro Baricco, Franz Bartelt , Henry Bauchau, Samuel Beckett, Alois Beer, Frederic Beigbeder, Julien Benda, Walter Benjamin, Émile Benveniste, Nikolaj Berdjajev, Thomas Bernhard, Giuseppe Berto, Alain Besancon, Ugo Betti, Maurice Blanchot, André Breton, Leons Briedis, Enrico Brizzi, Josif Brodski, Anita Brookner, Pascal Bruckner, Georg Büchner, Anthony Burgess, Richard F. Burton, Dino Buzzati, Antonia Susan Byatt, Massimo Cacciari, Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Albert Camus, Paola Capriolo, Ernst Cassirer, Juana Castro, Francesco M. Cataluccio, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Maurizio Chiarutini, Leonard Cohen, Philip J. Cohen, Peter Coles, John Coltrane, Julian Cope, Józef Czapski, Salvador Dali, Robertson Davies, Miles Davis, Ales Debeljak, Alain de Botton, Per Denez, D.A.F. de Sade, Fernando Dias Antunes, Wilhelm Dilthey, Tove Ditlevsen, Apostolos Doxiadis, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Bob Dylan, Ivan Dzjuba, Terry Eagleton, Umberto Eco, Albert Einstein, Mircea Eliade, Paul Eluard, Desiderius Erasmus, Ramon Diaz Eterovic, Alain Finkielkraut, Dario Fo, Alex Garland, Gajto Gazdanov, Beniamino Gigli, William Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, René Girard, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Emma Goldman, Witold Gombrowicz, Georgi Gospodinov, Romualdas Granauskas, Günter Grass, Vivian Green, Danko Grlic, Boris Groys, Leonid Gubanov, Margherita Guidacci, Pedro Juan Gutierrez, James W. Hackett, Gérard Haddad, Claude Hagège, Béla Hamvas, Daniil Harms, Vaclav Havel, Stephen Hawking, Martin Heidegger, Juan Mihovilovich Hernández, Alfred Hitchcock, Michel Houellebecq, Pavel Huelle, Richard Hülsenbeck, Eugene Ionesco, Igor Isakovski, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Fleur Jaeggy, Ernst Jandl, Bruno Jasienski, Karl Jaspers, Viktor Jerofejev, James Joyce, Imre Kertesz, Danilo Kis, Radosław Kobierski, Aleksandar Simonovic Korotko, Srecko Kosovel, Karl Kraus, Marko Kravos, Jurij Kublanovski, Milan Kundera, Hari Kunzru, Andrej Kurkov, Katalin Ladik , Sydney Lea, Arian Leka, Kveta Legatova, Gonzalo Lema, Rosa Lentini, David Lodge, Franco Loi, Sam J. Lundwall, Curzio Malaparte, Terrence Malick, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sándor Márai, Laura Marchig , Peter Markus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robert Marteau, Yann Martel, Walter Mehring, Dieter Mersch, Arvo Mets, Gustav Meyrink, Kenji Miyazawa, Czeslaw Milosz, Boleslaw Micinski, Patrick Modiano, Fulvio Monai, Totti dal Monte, Enrico Morovich, Sergej Morozoff, Toni Morrison, Gustav Munch-Petersen, Diego Munoz Valenzuela, Haruki Murakami, Girolamo Muzio, Azar Nafisi, Jozsef Nagy, Pablo Neruda, Max Nettlau, Saul Newman, Mikael Niemi, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rui Nunes, Michael Ondaatje, Iztok Osojnik, Josip Osti, Amos Oz, Charlie Parker-Bird, Boris Pasternak, Lech Pazdzierski, Viktor Pelevin, Saint-John Perse, Fernando Pessoa, Bernhard Peters, Ljudmila Petrusevskaja, Francis Picabia, Andrej Platonovi Platonov, Irina Poljanskaja, Paula von Preradovic, Pascal Quignard, Élisée Reclus, Carol Reed, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Paul Ricœur, Gabriel Rosenstock, Pentti Saarikoski, Ango Sakaguchi, Abdus Salam, Tomaz Salamun, Rifat Sallam, José Saramago, Raffaella Sarti, Gino Scartaghiande, Jens August Schade, Bruno Schulz, Kurt Schwitters, Ridley Scott, Walter Serner, Sam Shepard, Martin Sorescu, Xhevahir Spahiu, Steven Spielberg, Emil Staiger, Andrzej Stasiuk, Ilja Stogoff, Italo Svevo, Wislawa Szymborska, Antonio Tabucchi, Susanna Tamaro, Domenico Tarizzo, Torquato Tasso, Henry D. Thoreau, Uwe Timm, Fulvio Tomizza, Isacco Turina, Tristan Tzara, Ljudmila Ulickaja, Manuel Vargas, César Vallejo, Aleksandar Velicanski, Boris Vian, Marina Visneveckaja, Demetrio Vittorini, Kath Walker (Oodgeroo), Aleksander Wat, Adam Wazyk, Johannes Wickert, Oscar Wilde, Karol Wojtyla, Robert Paul Wolff, Banana Yoshimoto, Marian Zdziechowski, Viktor Zenchenko, Péter Zilahy, Ciril Zlobec ...