Author Josip Novakovich.

Josip Novakovich, an award-winning fiction writer and essayist known for his depictions of the Yugoslav war of the 1990s and its aftermath, reads from his work at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, at the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, 70 Campus Ave.

The first entry in the 2014-15 Language Arts Live literary reading series at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6326.

Novakovich, who emigrated from Croatia at age 20, is the author of several books in diverse genres, including the novel April Fool’s Day (HarperCollins, 2004) and three collections of short stories: Yolk (Graywolf Press, 1995), Salvation and Other Disasters (Graywolf, 1998) and Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust (HarperCollins, 2005).

Kirkus Review described Novakovich’s style as “an exhilarating hybrid compounded of wry understatement, dazzling aphoristic wit, infusions of peasant superstition and a deadpan, down-to-earth Central European variant of Latin American magical realism. Wonderful stories that won’t be easily forgotten.”

Novakovich was born in 1956 in what is now Croatia and grew up under the authoritarian rule of Marshal Tito in the town of Daruvar, near the Hungarian border. He studied medicine in Serbia, and then moved to America, where his mother had been born, and continued his studies, in psychology and then in creative writing, at Vassar College and at Yale.

He lives in Montreal, where he teaches creative writing at Concordia University, and he has recently taken Canadian citizenship.

In The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World, just published by Princeton University Press, Danforth examines the Macedonian conflict in light of contemporary theoretical work on ethnic nationalism, the construction of national identities and cultures, the invention of tradition and the role of the state in building a nation.

The conflict is set in the broader context of Balkan history and the more narrow context of the recent disintegration of Yugoslavia. The book concludes with an analysis of the construction of identity on an individual level among immigrants from northern Greece who have settled in Australia, where multiculturalism is an official policy.

Harvard anthropologist Michael Herzfeld calls the book “the clearest exposition yet of the extraordinary complexities that have led observers to equate Macedonia with ‘confusion’… it is the most dispassionate available commentary on what has become a highly politicized situation. The use of data from Australia is a stroke of genius.”

A cultural anthropologist, Danforth is also the author of The Death Rituals of Rural Greece and Firewalking and Religious Healing: The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement, both published by Princeton University Press.

Danforth joined the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty in 1985. He has received number of prestigious grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Danforth graduated from Amherst College and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton University.