Dubravka Ugrešić Book order

The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugresic's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life. With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall. Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.

From one of Europe's premier essayists and cultural critics, a new collection about our troubling political times

First new novel in almost a decade from one of Europe's most inventive, boundary-pushing, feminist authors.

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 post-industrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.

Finalist for the NBCC Award in Criticism, this collection is riotous, especially the piece about smashing a minibar.

"Baba Yaga Laid an Egg takes a traditional myth and spins it afresh. The result is an extraordinary meditation on femininity, aging, identity, secrets and love."--Taken from jacket front flap

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.

Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the "Ministry." Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their "Yugonostalgia" in essays about their personal experiences during their homeland's cultural and physical disintegration. But Tanja's act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class—and pulls her dangerously close to another—which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.

Taking us on travels through Europe, and across to the US, this book offers perspectives on literature, geopolitics, East and West. It also says that while the Eastern bloc is gripped by Western modernization, the West is becoming increasingly Sovietized, with Internet banking, speed dating and automatic supermarket checkouts.

The pieces 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 Dubravka Ugresic's reputation as one of Eastern Europe's most playful and inventive writers. From the story of Steffie Cvek, a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by clichés as she searches relentlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare advice from women's magazines and constructed like a sewing pattern, to "The Kharms Case," one of Ugresic's funniest stories ever about the strained relationship between a persistent translator and an unresponsive publisher, the pieces in this collection are always smart and endlessly entertaining.