Writings from an unbound Europe

Borislav Pekic's The Houses of Belgrade, first published in 1970, draws a parallel between the unrest culminating in the Belgrade student riots of 1968 and that at two earlier points in the history of Yugoslavia: the riots which immediately preceded Germany's attack on Belgrade in the spring of 1941 and the turmoil of Serbia's entry into World War I. Pekic relates his tale through the character of Arsenie Negovan, one of the prime builders of houses in Belgrade. Although Arsenie is dying, losing his sanity as his life seeps away, his narrative is sustained by his intellectual and aesthetic vision, by his love of buildings and his passionate obsession with the houses of Belgrade. Through this metaphor of the gradual decline of a builder's mind, Pekic gives us a compelling look at the unspoken fear of loss and destruction in a chronically disrupted urban society.

Bora Cosic, who together with Danilo Kis and Mirko Kovac is known as one of the major Yugoslavian writers of his generation, has been a favorite of readers and critics in Eastern Europe since he published his first novel in the 1960s. My Family's Role in the World Revolution was originally published in Yugoslavia in 1969; it enjoyed a successful run as a play, but the firm version was closed immediately and ultimately caused Cosic's publications to be banned in that country for over four years. My Family's Role in the World Revolution takes place in Yugoslavia during and after World War II. During the German occupation of Belgrade, family members - an alarmist mother whose off-the-wall comments are always right on target, an eternally inebriated father, two young aunts who swoon over American movie stars, and a playboy uncle - keep attempting to find any kind of work they can do at home. Then, as the postwar Socialist society is being ushered into this Belgrade kitchen, the narrator, a naively wise schoolboy, becomes the slogan-spouting ideological leader of the household, while the remaining members try - and often fail miserably - to take part in the "great change.". With humor reminiscent of Bohumil Hrabal and experimentation reminiscent of James Joyce, Cosic exposes the underside of the Communist revolution, revealing its destructive effects: chaos, bewilderment, and fear. This volume also includes several of Cosic's short stories, as well as recent essays in which he denounces the most recent war that has left him without a homeland.

"Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she and discovers everyone--and everything--has its own story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish side, the other on the Czech side. Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe."--Amazon.com

"This is the first American publication of three works by one of Eastern Europe's most original and inventive writers. Dubravka Ugresic's In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories collects two short novels and a group of short stories grounded in fact and informed by fancy. The title novel, Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life, charts the life of a typist for a lonely hearts column. Laid out like a sewing pattern, with instructions, diagrams, and helpful hints in the margin, it juxtaposes the cliches and trite advice of stereotypical women's magazines and popular culture with the genuine despair of the marginalized heroine. The short stories collected in Life is a Fairy Tale (Metaterxies) draw on the author's academic background to produce wickedly funny parodies and droll pastiches of such writers as Daniil Kharms and Gogol. Whether depicting the anonymous lives of small characters in big cities or rewriting great works from a distinctly irreverent perspective, Ugresic is fresh, entertaining, and consistently surprising."--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.