Words are something else

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.