Dubravka Ugrešić Books In Order

Novels

Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1991)
Lend Me Your Character (2005)
The Ministry of Pain (2006)
Nobody’s Home (2007)
Fox (2018)

Collections

In the Jaws of Life (1992)
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998)

Non fiction

Have a Nice Day (1994)
The Culture of Lies (1998)
Thank You for Not Reading (2003)
Karaoke Culture (2011)
Europe in Sepia (2014)
American Fictionary (2018)
Age of Skin (2020)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Dubravka Ugrešić Books Overview

Lend Me Your Character

‘Splendidly ambitious…
A brilliant, enthralling spread of story telling and high velocity reflections. In her indignation and in her sorrow Ugresic speaks for many people, many experiences. She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.’ Susan SontagFrom the story of Steffie Cvek to ‘The Kharms Case,’ the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic’s collection Lend Me Your Character are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by clich s. She searches endlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare advice from women’s magazines and constructed like a sewing pattern. The latter story is one of Ugresic’s funniest and is about the strained relationship between a persistent translator and an unresponsive publisher. The stories 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 Ugresic’s reputation as one of Eastern Europe’s most playful and inventive writers.

The Ministry of Pain

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.

Nobody’s Home

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.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Critically acclaimed experimental, literary fiction by the famous Croatian exile author. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by the renowned Yugoslavian writer Dubravka Ugresic begins in the Berlin Zoo, with the contents of Roland the Walrus’s stomach displayed beside his pool Roland died in August, 1961. These objects a cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer bottle opener, etc. like the fictional pieces of the novel itself, are seemingly random at first, but eventually coalesce, meaningfully and poetically. Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of a life in exile. Some chapters re create the daily journal of the narrator’s lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dream like narrative in which a circle of women friends are visited by an angel. There are reflections and accounts of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Civil War; portraits of European artists; a recipe for Caraway Soup; a moving story of a romantic encounter the narrator has in Lisbon; descriptions of family photographs; memories of the small town in which Ugresic was raised. Addressing the themes of art and history, aging and loss, The Museum is a haunting and an extremely original novel. In the words of the Times Literary Supplement, ‘it is vivid in its denunciation of destructive forces and in its evocation of what is at stake.’

The Culture of Lies

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.

Thank You for Not Reading

‘A brilliant, enthralling spread of story telling and high velocity reflections…
Ugresic is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.’ Susan SontagIn this collection of acerbic essays, Ugresic dissects the nature of the contemporary book industry, which she argues is so infected with the need to create and promote literature that will appeal to the mas*ses literally to everyone that if Thomas Mann were writing nowadays, his books wouldn’t even be published in the U.S. because they’re not sexy enough. A playful and biting critique, Ugresic’s essays hit on all of the major aspects of publishing: agents, subagents, and scouts, supermarket like bookstores, Joan Collins, book fairs that have little to do with books, authors promoted because of sex appeal instead of merit, and editors trying to look like writers by having their photograph taken against a background of bookshelves. Thanks to cultural influences such as Oprah, The Today Show, and Kelly Ripa, best seller lists have become just a modern form of socialist realism, a manifestation of a society that generally ignores literature in favor of the next big thing.