LITERARY LAS VEGAS

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Josip Novakovich's time at UNLV as a Black Mountain Institute fellow is almost at an end. The fellowship program brings acclaimed writers and public intellectuals to Southern Nevada for a nine-month program that allows them the freedom to write and do research, while the community and the university benefit from lectures and classroom visits.

Novakovich and Black Mountain fellows Tom Bissell and Donna Hemans plan to present The Imagination in Exile: Writing Where you Aren't at 7 p.m. on Wednesday in the Barrick Museum auditorium on the UNLV campus. Richard Wiley, associate director of the Black Mountain Institute, is set to moderate the presentation.

Bissell wrote of the contrast between his views of the Vietnam of the '70s and today in "The Father of All Things," while Hemans concentrated on New York and Jamaica in "River Woman." Novakovich's roots in Croatia provided fuel for his novel "April Fool's Day."

In addition to the novel, Novakovich, who teaches in the master of fine arts program at Penn State University, has published three story collections and two collections of essays. His work has been featured in the "Pushcart Prize" collection, "The O. Henry Prize Stories" and the "Best American Poetry."

Announcement of selection of fellows for 2008-09 is expected May 1. For more information about the program, visit blackmountain.unlv.edu.

Excerpt from "April Fool's Day"

Ivan Dolinar was born on the first of April in 1948. Since his parents did not want him to go through life as a Fool's Day joke, they registered his birthday as the second of April, in the Nizograd Birth Registry in Croatia. His surly father gave the baby the first name that popped into his head -- the most common name in the region and, for that matter, Europe. Nobody else in the family tree, however, bore that name, from what Milan could tell, and that was a further advantage to choosing it, since he didn't feel particularly grateful to the tree.

That Milan Dolinar was surly was not personal but historical. On his wedding day, the sixth of April, 1941, Belgrade was bombarded. The king, having signed the pact with Germany, had already fled the country (taking along all the gold that could fit on his plane and dropping some to enable the plane to attain sufficient altitude to fly over the Bosnian mountains toward Greece -- to this day people look for gold in Bosnia), and a variety of armies, domestic and imported, began to crawl through the country.

Ivan's father was drafted into one of them. He distinguished himself by courage on the battlefield and would have received the highest honors had he not changed armies several times and joined the winning side too late.