Nobody's Home - Hardcover

Dubravka Ugresic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1934824003 ISBN 13: 9781934824009

Publisher: Open Letter, 2008

Synopsis

"Ugresic is sharp, funny and unafraid. . . . Orwell would approve."—Times Literary Supplement

"Every day and age has its rules. Currently, good behavior dictates that we be politically correct, evade conflicts, espouse tolerance, and make no hasty judgments. To be judgmental is viewed as one of the most reprehensible human traits. People are likely to think today that an optimist is a good person, while a pessimist is the lowest of the low. Picking your nose in public is more forgivable then being pessimistic. [. . .] We live in a time that urges us to behave as if we are in paradise. Yet the world we live in is no paradise. This book breaks the rules of good behavior, because it bickers."

This series of thought-provoking and incisive essays from Dubravka Ugresic explores the full spectrum of human existence. From life in exile to life in prison, from bottled-water drinking tourists with massive backpacks to the Eurovision song contest, Ugresic's unfailingly sharp critical eye never fails to reveal what has been hidden in plain sight by routine, or uncover the tragic, and the comic, in the everyday.

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.

About this title

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.

Review

"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

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Letter
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1934824003
• ISBN 13: 9781934824009
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 297