Dubravka Ugrešić

Pigeons are crazy about public sculptures. For pigeons there’s no greater happiness than perching down on the head of a sculpture and taking a dump. Sculptures are for people to consecrate and pigeons to desecrate. The truth is that, for some reason, people are crazy about ...

I. The Code You need to know how to talk to these small nations. At the recent Bosnian and Croatian premieres of her film In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie gave a master class in how it’s done. As a film star, Jolie could’ve done as she pleased, yet she ...

Fatal Attraction An acquaintance of mine was into fly-fishing. I wouldn’t have had a clue what it was all about had he not shown me his resplendent collection of flies, their miniature beauty enchanting. I could easily imagine a dazzled salmon in a shady Scottish stream, an ...

I don’t know why, but the rules of market-oriented literary culture remind me of good old socialist realism. I admit that my head’s a bit muddled from the trauma known as Eastern Europe, but that’s what I think. I also admit that I travel too much—here, there, back ...

One of the most enduring stereotypes stuck in the heads of citizens of Western democracies is the idea that people in the former Communist systems were mere numbers deprived of individual freedom. Now that the Communist countries have been shattered like cheap cups, it is time ...