He manages to escape in his assailants’ van and makes it back to the US, only to find a bag of marijuana in it. Using this as an impetus to change his life, Zack sets off for New York with the weed and a vintage Nikon. Through the lens of the old camera, he starts rediscovering himself by photographing an America we rarely see. His journey unleashes a series of erratic, hilarious, and life-threatening events interspersed with flashbacks to his relationship with Stella and life in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s.A suspenseful, darkly funny love story, 18% Gray won both the Bulgarian Novel of the Year Award and the Flower of the Readers Award when it was first published in 2008.

    The Death of Yugoslavia is a survey of the pressures and events that contributed to the break-up of former Yugoslavia, considered from a historical rather than a political or sociological point of view.

    The characters in these stories are caught in a world of political hypocrisy, which ultimately leads to death, their common fate. Although the stories Kis tells are based on historical events, the beauty and precision of his prose elevates these ostensibly true stories into works of literary art that transcend the politics of their time.

    As his story unwinds, he seeks out places that represent stages of his and the continent's past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain to Austria, from a congress for experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of Jew's harp virtuosos. His story--and its telling--are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer, and seems to be as much of a demon as she is the longed-for destination of his travels.Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night tracks the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of life. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke tenaciously follows the movement of his own thoughts while gracing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, "Handke's sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world." The Moravian Night is a bruising self-portrait, an elegy for the lost and forgotten, and a novel of self-interrogation and uneasy discovery from one of world literature’s great voices.

    Eminescu (1850-1889) was a complex personality; at once a philosopher, politician, journalist, and prose writer, but above all a poet -- he is 'an expression of the Romanian soul'. The selection in this volume includes English language versions of some of Eminescu's best-known poems and is illustrated with original drawings by the Romanian artist A Bordenache and graphics from the princeps edition of Eminescu's poems published in 1883.

    Serb forces besieged the town for three years, undeterred even when it was proclaimed a ‘UN Safe Area’. As more and more refugees fled to Srebrenica from the surrounding villages, conditions there became unbearable: near-starvation, daily death, degradation of civilized life. The victims themselves were caught up in the dialectic of violence. Finally, after three years of agony, and as those sent to protect them stood by, Srebrenica was destroyed. In just a few days in July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces murdered some 8,000 people.Against all odds Emir Suljagić survived, while the lives of nearly every man he had ever known – and those of many women too – were wiped out. His haunted record of those terrible times offers a fitting monument to those who died.Afterword by Ed Vulliamy, Guardian journalist and author of Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War.Emir Suljagić was born in 1975 in Ljubovija, Yugoslavia (Serbia), but spent his youth across the river Drina in Bratunac (Bosnia-Herzegovina). In April 1992, along with thousands of other Bosnian Muslims, he sought refuge in Srebrenica. After the war he read political science at the University of Sarajevo, and from September 1996 worked as a reporter and staff writer for the Sarajevo-based weekly magazine Dani. Between 2002 and 2004 he reported from The Hague on the Yugoslav war-crimes trials, as a correspondent for Dani and for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting. He lives in Sarajevo.

    Otpor’s methods . . . have been adopted by democracy movements around the world. The Egyptian opposition used them to topple Hosni Mubarak. In Lebanon, the Serbs helped the Cedar Revolution extricate the country from Syrian control. In Maldives, their methods were the key to overthrowing a dictator who had held power for thirty years. In many other countries, people have used what Canvas teaches to accomplish other political goals, such as fighting corruption or protecting the environment.”—The New York Times“A clear, well-constructed, and easily applicable set of principles for any David facing any Goliath (sans slingshot, of course) . . . By the end of Blueprint, the idea that a punch is no match for a punch line feels like anything but a joke.”—The Boston Globe“An entertaining primer on the theory and practice of peaceful protest.”—The Guardian “With this wonderful book, Srdja Popovic is inspiring ordinary people facing injustice and oppression to use this tool kit to challenge their oppressors and create something much better. When I was growing up, we dreamed that young people could bring down those who misused their power and create a more just and democratic society. For Srdja Popovic, living in Belgrade in 1998, this same dream was potentially a much more dangerous idea. But with an extraordinarily courageous group of students that formed Otpor!, Srdja used imagination, invention, cunning, and lots of humor to create a movement that not only succeeded in toppling the brutal dictator Slobodan Milošević but has become a blueprint for nonviolent revolution around the world. Srdja rules!”—Peter Gabriel   “Blueprint for Revolution is not only a spirited guide to changing the world but a breakthrough in the annals of advice for those who seek justice and democracy. It asks (and not heavy-handedly): As long as you want to change the world, why not do it joyfully? It’s not just funny. It’s seriously funny. No joke.”—Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties and Occupy Nation

    With perspectives from American and German pilots alike, this gripping thriller will keep you turning pages until the fateful ending.

    It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Ottoman authorities in his search to discover what happened to him. He narrates his story in the form of an elaborate suicide note, regularly misquoting the Koran. In time, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general. Hugely successful when published in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish is an enduring classic that was made into a feature length film in 1974.

    Bloc Life collects first hand testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era, and reveals a rich tapestry of experience that goes beyond the headlines of spies and surveillance, secret police and political corruption. In fact, many of the people remember their lives under communism as 'perfectly ordinary' and even hanker for the 'security' that it offered.From political leaders, athletes and pop stars, to cooks, miners and cosmonauts, the stories collected in Bloc Life evoke the moods, preoccupations and experiences of a world that vanished almost overnight.

    This book captures the essence of life during wartime, seen from the apartment window of one who was there at ground zero. The moral ambiguities of war, the horrific reality, the humanity. This volume includes Zograf's entire e-mail correspondence to his friends throughout the world during the bombing of his hometown of Pancevo, as well as all of his comic strips produced over the decade Bosnian/Serbian war. For those who appreciated Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde and Palestine, you will not want to miss this very important book.

    In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character–a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang’s, and she loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. When the violence and terror of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city.If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She scuttles under windows in her own home to dodge bullets. She risks her life to communicate with an old Serb school friend and teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of mortar fire.In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, “duties as assigned,” which she accepts. She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for the “mist” that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena’s new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here, in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carré thriller, he re-creates the atmosphere of that place and time and the pain and dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the auspicious beginning of yet another brilliant career for its author.From the Hardcover edition.

    He lists his doctor and maids, his dog and his wife’s sister, but he doesn’t list any of his own sisters. The four Freud sisters are shuttled to the Terezín concentration camp, while their brother lives out his last days in London.Based on a true story, this searing novel gives haunting voice to Freud’s sister Adolfina—“the sweetest and best of my sisters”—a gifted, sensitive woman who was spurned by her mother and who never married. From her closeness with her brother in childhood, to her love for a fellow student, to her time with Gustav Klimt’s sister in a Vienna psychiatric hospital, to her dream of one day living in Venice and having a family, Freud’s Sister imagines the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history with astonishing insight and deep feeling.Link to Penguin

    Unafraid to speak the truth, Spahić takes us on a journey through the revolution, changing our way of seeing this chapter of history while simultaneously challenging our own sense of identity. As much about the fall of Communism as it is about the continuing disparity between West and East, Hansen's Children simply cannot fail to move you.

    An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination? In The Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe.