Table of Contents

CONTENTS


1.
A Global View
Flea Market
A Suitcase
The Basement
A Right to Misery
Stereotypes
Ostalgia
The Tamils
Birdhouse
Gardening
My Hometown
Old Age—New Craze
Ah, that Rhetoric
Little Dog—Big Bark
Time and Space
The Natives
History and Culture
Shit
Sobs
Heart
Identity
Pavlik Morozov
Happiness
Celebs
Rise Up, Ye Slavs!
Beauty Killed the Beast


2.
Europe, Europe (August 2000)
Amsterdam, Amsterdam (2001)
USA Nails (September 2002)


3.
What is European about European Literature? (October 2003—September 2005)
Literary Geopolitics (April 2004)
Transition: Morphs & Sliders & Polymorphs (October 2004)
Opium (2006)

4.
The Stendhal Syndrome
Leaving it to Lolita
Let Putin Kiss a Wet Slippery Fish
The New Barbarians
All Foreigners Beep...
The Underclass
A Requiem for the Yugoslav Guest Worker
A Monument to the Polish Plumber
Marlene
Go, Burekana, Go!

5.
The Alibi of Cultural Differences, or: How I Got the Picture (December 2004)
Souvenirs of Communism (January 2005)
A Postcard from My Vacation (2006)
Nobody’s Home (June 2005)

6.
Author’s Note

About the Author

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.

Ellen Elias-Bursac is an American scholar and literary translator. Specializing in South Slavic literature, she has translated numerous works from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian.

Reviews

"Croatian novelist/essayist Ugresic (The Ministry of Pain, 2006, etc.), now a resident of Amsterdam, offers discerning, sometimes grumpy commentary on a rapidly changing Europe—and a rapidly changing world ... Taut, timely pieces by a writer who sees the cosmic in the quotidian."—Kirkus Reviews

"Dubravka Ugresic is Walter Benjamin's Baudelaire, the poetic sojourner who finds himself at the whim of the crowd. She is the flaneur cast into the streets, nowhere at home. And like Baudelaire, Ugresic is a writer in full view of and at odds with the forces of commodity culture, a writer whose mission is to give form to modernity. But if Baudelaire's poetry is permeated by melancholic doom, Ugresic's diagnosis of life's illusory qualities is delightfully judgmental and cheerily pessimistic. Or as she tartly concludes in Nobody's Home, her new collection of essays, 'this book breaks the rules of good behavior, because it bickers.'"—NIcole Rudick, Bookforum

"Nobody's Home is a collection of essays that offers life from the exile's point of view, with all its tragic absurdities."—June Avignone, University of Rochester Currents

"This book is part memoir, part shrewd observation, part travel writing at its best. Each section opens with a loving quotation from the Russian satirists Ilf and Petrov, and Ugresic writes with something of their impish genius."—Telegraph