Kirjahaku

Abandoned by her husband in Berlin after being forced into exile by the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic seeks sanctuary in the Department of Slavonic Language at the University of Amsterdam, where she and her fellow displaced students struggle to confront their traumatic memories of their homeland. By the author of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Tanja Lucic teaches at the University of Amsterdam and lives on the edge of the city's red light district. She and her pupils, fleeing the violent break-up of their homeland Yugoslavia, have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Desperate to make ends meet, many of the students find work at the 'Ministry', a fetish-wear factory in North Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.

Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology. She appears in many forms: as Pupa, a tricksy, cantankerous old woman who keeps her legs tucked into a huge furry boot; as a trio of mischievous elderly women who embark on the trip of a lifetime to a hotel spa; and as a villainous flock of ravens, black hens and magpies infected with the H5N1 virus. But what story does Baba Yaga have to tell us today? This is a quizzical tale about one of the most pervasive and poerful creatures in all mythology, and an extraordinary yarn of identity, secrets, storytelling and love.

Finalist for the NBCC award for Criticism."Ugresic is sharp, funny and unafraid. . . . Orwell would approve."--Times Literary SupplementOver the past three decades, Dubravka Ugresic has established herself as one of Europe"s greatest--and most entertaining--thinkers and creators, and it's in her essays that Ugresic is at her sharpest. With laser focus, she pierces our pop culture, dissecting the absurdity of daily life with a wit and style that's all her own.Whether it's commentary on jaded youth, the ways technology has made us soft in the head, or how wrestling a hotel minibar into a bathtub is the best way to stick it to The Man, Ugresic writes with unmatched honesty and panache. Karaoke Culture is full of candid, personal, and opinionated accounts of topics ranging from the baffling worldwide-pop-culture phenomena to the detriments of conformist nationalism. Sarcastic, biting, and, at times, even heartbreaking, this new collection of essays fully captures the outspoken brilliance of Ugresic's insights into our modern world's culture and conformism, the many ways in which it is ridiculous, and how (deep, deep down) we are all true suckers for it.Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction and several essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being label a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands.David Williams did his doctoral research on the post-Yugoslav writings of Dubravka Ugresic and the idea of a "literature of the Eastern European ruins." He is the author of Writing Postcommunism.

"Ugresic is sharp, funny and unafraid. . . . Orwell would approve."--Times Literary SupplementHurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it's the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic's writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her "the fantasy cultural studies professor you never had." In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the flaneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zuccotti Park, the Irish Aran Islands to Jerusalem's Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.Infused with compassion and melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of irreducible nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by the levity of Ugresic's raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has seldom been so beguiling.Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction and several essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being label a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands.David Williams did his doctoral research on the post-Yugoslav writings of Dubravka Ugresic and the idea of a "literature of the Eastern European ruins." He is the author of Writing Postcommunism.

A Best Book of 2018 at Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the New Statesman Fox is the story of literary footnotes and "minor" characters--unnoticed people propelled into timelessness through the biographies and novels of others. With Ugresic's characteristic wit, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, betrayal, and the randomness of human lives.

Thank You for Not Reading is a biting critique of book publishing: agents, subagents, and scouts, supermarket-like bookstores, Joan Collins, book fairs that have little to do with books, authors promoted because of sex appeal instead of merit, and editors trying to look like writers by having their photograph taken against a background of bookshelves. Nowadays, the best strategy for young authors wanted to publish is to become famous in some other capacity first--as a sports star, an actress, or an Ivana Trump. One of the most interesting and paradoxical comparisons coming out of Ugresic's dissection of book culture is the similarity between the art of socialist realism (as prescribed by the Soviets) and the nature of the contemporary marketplace to produce and promote art that appeals to everyone. Thanks to cultural forces like listicles and celebrity book clubs, the publishing machine neglects literature in favor of accessible, entertaining books for the masses.

From the author of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Thank You for Not ReadingFrom the story of Steffie Cvek to "The Kharms Case," the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic's collection Lend Me Your Character are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by cliches. She searches endlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare advice from women's magazines and constructed like a sewing pattern. The latter story is one of Ugresic's funniest and is about the strained relationship between a persistent translator and an unresponsive publisher. The stories collected in Lend Me Your Character, the novella "Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life," and a collection of short stories entitled "Life Is a Fairy Tale" solidify Ugresic's reputation as one of Eastern Europe's most playful and inventive writers."

Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for LiteratureAs with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresic's final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is a conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragic, covering topics such as "Women and the Male Perspective," "The Culture of (Self)Harm," and "The Melancholy of Vanishing." But the book is more than a simple interview: It's a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil--especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic's birth country--and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing. One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, who novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.

Folksagans lömska och gränsöverskridande räv är återkommande motiv i Dubravka Ugresics nya roman – en kaleidoskopisk berättelse som för läsaren från Ryssland till Japan, över slagfälten på Balkan och en resa genom Nordamerika med paret Nabokov, från 1920-tal till nutid. Den ger röst åt människor ur historiens och litteraturens marginal, och ställer frågan: Vad är det som gör oss till dem vi är?

Att minnas och glömma, att älska och svika, att fly och förlora - detta är vad Dubravka Ugresic återkommer till i sitt författarskap. På en genreöverskridande prosa som ledigt rör sig mellan fiktion och essä gestaltar hon ett sökande efter personlig, politisk och historisk identitet i ljuset av en påtvingad exil.I denna samlingsvolym återfinns två av Ugresics mest hyllade böcker – Den ovillkorliga kapitulationens museum (2000) samt Smärtans ministerium (2005) – verk som berör efterdyningarna av Jugoslaviens sönderfall på 1990-talet och exilens pris, men som i migrationens tidevarv har fått en alltmer universell giltighet.I Den ovillkorliga kapitulationens museum utforskar Dubravka Ugresic minnets mekanismer och frilägger den smärtpunkt som exilen innebär. Allt mot bakgrund av det museikafé i Berlin där flyktingar från olika delar av det sönderfallande Jugoslavien samlades.Smärtans ministerium utspelar sig bland exiljugoslaver i på universitetet i Amsterdam. En kvinnlig litteraturvetare, också hon före detta jugoslav, provocerar dem att minnas det de helst vill glömma; boken berör frågor om skuld och ansvar samtidigt som den också är en kärleksberättelse som kretsar kring smärtans ofrånkomliga väsen.

These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka Ugresic, winner of the Neustadt International Prize and one of Europe's most influential writers, with biting humor and a multitude of cultural references--from La La Land and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, to tattoos and body modification, World Cup chants, and the preservation of Lenin's corpse--takes on the dreams, hopes, and fears of modern life. The collapse of Yugoslavia, and the author's subsequent exile from Croatia, leads to reflections on nationalism and the intertwining of crime and politics. Ugresic writes at eye level, from a human perspective, in portraits of people from the former Eastern Bloc, who work as cleaners in the Netherlands or start underground shops with products from their country of origin. A rare and welcome combination of irony, compassion, and a sharp polemic gaze characterizes these beautiful and highly relevant essays.