A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” from a Croatian writer whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon (Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize–winning author)
Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.
"Miljenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro relies on minute details, such as a dead cactus and a grandmother’s ring, to distinguish individuals’ numbed reactions to the devastation of the Bosnian war. There’s a melancholy, dreamlike sameness to Jergovic’s war stories that recalls Alan Lightman’s use of time in Einstein’s Dreams and Italo Calvino’s meditations on place in Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three." —Maud Newton, Newsday Favorite Book of the Year
"A remarkable collection. . . Grim, beautiful ruminations on how the familiarities of life can, in the instant a bomb drops, become unrecognizable. . . . With a natural sense of stopping point and courage to spare, Jergovic has the mien of the rare author whose gift is so innate he need only conquer a few demons and steady his hands enough to write it all down."
—San Diego Union Tribune
"Poetic and moving…Of the many books written on Bosnia, this collection of stories is perhaps the best."
— Slavenka Drakulic
