Ma Belle

Maja Herman Sekulic has written a fantastic piece of historical metafiction about a woman named Mabel Grujic. Having invested years of research into the life of this “renaissance woman”, the author weaves an enchanting tale of the world in one of its most tumultuous times, the turn of the twentieth century through the Great War and into the early 1920s. Seen through the eyes of an American woman married to an influential Serb, the Balkan mayhem takes on an empathetic hue; Mabel Grujic profoundly identified with the Serbian people as they developed their country from a largely agricultural nation into a modern state, all the while facing the horrors of the Balkan Wars and WWI. Written in a first-person narrative, the novel draws the reader in on a personal level and aspires to depict the birth of a nation through sacrifice, determination, hard work, and education.

Maja Herman-Sekulić is an internationally published Serbian author of 14 books. She is an acclaimed poet, popular novelist, distinguished essayist, bilingual scholar, and a major translator. She is also a Princeton Ph.D. in Comparative Literature who taught at prestigious universities such as Princeton, Rutgers, and was a guest lecturer at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Iowa. Her new novel Ma Belle, now in English translation, was nominated in 2016 for the most prestigious Serbian literary award as were her two previous novels, Slike kojih nema, u potrazi za Lolitom (soon to be published in English as Looking for Lolita) and Kralj svile (In Search of the Silk King). In 2015, besides her book Who was Nikola Tesla? The Genius who gave us Light, her selected poems came out in a bilingual English-French e-edition, De La Terre de Desolation/Out of the Waste Land. Her Selected Works are now in preparation for publication being out of print or in demand as text books for students of Anglo/American literature. First in the series is Sketches for Portraits, a unique book of essays and conversations with major American writers, such as J.Brodsky, S. Sontag, A.Miller, she befriended.

Maja Herman Sekulić is a contributing editor for major magazines and a world traveller. Born in Belgrade, where she studied World literature, she spent last decade of the last century in the Far East and now shares her time between New York and Belgrade.