David Albahari

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"The narrator of Bait has just exiled himself to Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the death of his mother. As he listens to a series of audio tapes recorded by his mother years before, the narrator ponders her life and their relationship while simultaneously trying to come to terms with a new life of his own - one of exile and the confusion of a new language and culture. Bait is an exquisitely crafted novel that exhibits the wit and raw honesty Albahari's readers have long admired."--BOOK JACKET.

David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed almost entirely outside the "national" canon of Serbian literature, have exerted a great influence on the younger generation of writers from that part of the world. This collection gathers Albahari's best and most important stories. As opposed to many of his fellow Serbians, for whom literature is primarily a political statement, David Albahari is a writer whose carefully chiseled stories explore the full range of human experience. The pieces in this collection have been chosen to represent the trends in Albahari's development, moving from an early preoccupation with the family and the Central European cultural milieu to later metafictional searches for the roots of his identity Framed by a foreword by poet Charles Simic and an afterword by Tomislav Longinovic, Word Are Something Else provides an invaluable introduction to this foremost Serbian postmodernist writer.

"A beautifully written prose work, Tsing is a multi-layered narrative that combines a wholly fictional novel-within-a-novel with an episodic chronicle of the narrator's present as a traveler to and visiting writer in the United States.". "Much more than an "ordinary" postmodern text, Tsing is a quiet and moving paean to the narrator's deceased father. Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and a daughter, Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together with considerable skill. As Albahari's fragments - simple stories about persons approaching each other, spending some time together, and eventually going their separate ways - accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness."--BOOK JACKET.