1 The television room had never been so full and so silent, except for the announcer's voice booming for more than an hour. Nobody added a whisper to his commentary. Nobody made a move to leave. It was the first time that the entire group of political prisoners at Spaç, including the mine workers and the reserves, had assembled in that hut hammered together out of planks and rusty sheet iron. Sitting more closely crammed than ever before on the rows of stools, we were...

Written before the Second World War but not widely available until 1962, Miroslav Krleza's Banquet in Blitva combines the satire of a Jonathan Swift with the style and tone of the Austrian Recession and the extravagant technique of expressionism. Shot through with drama and invective, told in torrents of verbiage, the novel takes place in a number of imaginary Baltic states that form an allegorical expression of the history of the Balkan states that once comprised Yugoslavia. The plot...

She was always afraid of missing the beautiful and important things in life. She traveled a lot, but more often she panicked because she was stuck at home. For some reason she always imagined that real happiness and pleasure lay elsewhere. As a result she was forever thinking up new ways of stopping time and grasping that crystal moment when life becomes a dream or a fairy tale. Suddenly, at the end of December 1990, she told me she longed to spend New Year's Eve on the island of...

The villa in Acibadem left a clear mark on every stage of my life. It isn't just that it touched my tender years like all those miracles of childhood are bound to do. It influenced my way of thinking, my character. The house belonged to my mother's uncle. Sani Bey was of medium height and had a graying beard when I knew him; he was a wide-shouldered, well-built man with blue eyes. He had once served as captain in the navy. But was he a regular or a graduate of naval engineering?...

The story began for me when I fled a family marriage arranged by my mother's brother. In rebellion, I accepted a post in a forgotten village at the city's far perimeter. But my troubled conscience, and the longing I felt for my artist uncle, yielded the uneasy feeling that I must hold myself responsible for his sorrows, his disappointment and his pleas. He had invested all his hopes in me, having seen my attentiveness-mouth hanging open-to his projections and sketches and his...

"Well, let's fly . . ." "Why, a geologist of course, no question about it," said the rector with a scowl. "A spy wouldn't throw himself under a train because of a broken heart." "Bravo, correct! And Winnie-the-Pooh? That's a tough one." "Hmm, Winnie-the-Pooh, well, I would say a spy," said the rector thoughtfully. "The geologist is probably Piglet." "You see?" said Lednev cheerily. "You can already classify the examples correctly. But your one mistake is that you...

Me and Perestroika Now I will tell you how perestroika collapsed. To be more precise, it hasn't collapsed yet, but it definitely will due to the archaic institutions of the family and marriage, which dominate in times of real socialism. To be fair, one must add that history recalls a few cases when trivia stood in the way of great achievements. Such was the case with the emperor Peter Fedorovich, who didn't succeed in carrying out his reformist program only because, several...

The eighties began with the Olympics in Moscow. In spite of the boycott by many western countries, Leonid Brezhnev, who was General Secretary at the time, was determined to prevent the whole thing from turning into a pure propaganda show. The Olympic Games were going to be turned into a giant cultural and political event. Moscow was to be cleansed of parasites of all kinds, and new electronic billboards bought from the Americans through Pakistani middlemen would be put up in the stadiums....

Now I will tell you how perestroika collapsed. To be more precise, it hasn't collapsed yet, but it definitely will due to the archaic institutions of the family and marriage, which dominate in times of real socialism. To be fair, one must add that history recalls a few cases when trivia stood in the way of great achievements. Such was the case with the emperor Peter Fedorovich, who didn't succeed in carrying out his reformist program only because, several times, in public, he...

Nancy was this woman. From America. A woman general. And not just a general, but an advisor to the president. Rumor even had it she could do the same amount of push-ups as any other American general and advisor to the president. And here she was coming all the way to the great Russian North to pay us a visit. Back then our country was in the throes of perestroika, and she was visiting us just to see whether we were doing as bad a job of it as the rest of the world was inclined to think....

By chance, the first roulette player I ever saw escaped with his life. Since then, for many years in a row, I attended hundreds of roulettes and I saw many times an image that cannot be described: the human brain, the only veritably divine substance, the alchemical gold which contains everything, scattered on the walls and on the floor, mixed up with splinters of skull. Think about bullfighting or gladiators and you will understand why this game soon infused my blood and changed my life....

All I have left from this story is a white Caribbean suit, a Panama hat, and a cassette tape that I've carried persistently in my left shirt pocket. And a pair of white shoes which, if I hadn't lost them in the course of my journey, would complement the suit, which I'm wearing now. It must have been in the autumn. October, to be more exact. Spring doesn't tend to go on for very long in Basra, and one could wear clothes such as these only in a moderate season. It almost...

Iocasta: What is an exile's life? Is it great misery? Polyneices: The greatest; worse in reality than in report. Iocasta: Worse in what way? What chiefly galls an exile's heart? Polyneices: The worst is this: right of free speech does not exist. Iocasta: That's a slave's life—to be forbidden to speak one's mind. (Euripides, The Phoenician Women; author's translation) Writers in exile often face the question of why they left their countries, and whether this...

The kid who sells roasted chestnuts at the end of the Ponte Garibaldi gets down to work. He sits in a groove in the parapet of the bridge with a small stove between his legs, looking no one in the face, as if his relationship to the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand, not the physical hand of a small boy or an elderly lady, but an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined...

Set in an Iraqi village during the Iran-Iraq war, Scattered Crumbs critiques a totalitarian dictatorship through the stories of an impoverished peasant family. A father (Hajji Ijayel), a fierce supporter of Saddam Hussein--here called only the Leader--clashes with his artist son, who loves his homeland but finds himself literally unable to paint the Leader's portrait for his father's wall. The novel evokes the deterioration both of the country and of the individual characters...

Set in the border triangle of Iran, Irak, and Turkey, Im Grenzland [At the Borderline] is the story of an Iraqi Kurd who makes his living as a smuggler. Having bought a map of landmines from a former soldier, the smuggler negotiates a path through the war-torn border region to bring items that have become luxuries (due to embargo) back into his country. On each trip he unearths land mines on his way out of the country and buries them on his way back. He reads the empty landscape like a...

He never considered himself an exiled politician. He abandoned his country out of a strange impulse that was forged in three stages. The first was when he was approached by four successive beggars on the Avenue. The second was when a minister said the word Peace on television and his right eyelid immediately started to tremble. The third was when he entered his neighborhood church and saw that a Christ (not the most divine one, crowded with candles, but another, crestfallen, on a side...

Dreams don't come to us without being provoked externally, which is what happened to me yesterday when I woke up at five in the morning, precisely the hour I had intended to get up. I found myself on someone's trail and soon I saw Kassem and said something as I approached him, even though I was astonished that I would be able to talk to him while he was no longer among the living; then I realized that it wasn't Kassem but my faithful servant Sha'aban and that I wanted him to...

In this 1995 story, Bun-nyo is an elderly superintendent at a reservoir in the countryside. She devotes much of her time and effort to taking care of a flourishing flower garden that she has planted in honor of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who visited the reservoir once in her younger days. The story begins as she hears the devastating news of Kim's death. "Grandma, Grandma, get up." Bun-nyo heard voices, choking with tears, and felt small, desperate hands shaking her shoulders....

Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners. In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses would be handed over to India. I can't say whether this decision made sense or not. In any event, a date for the lunatic exchange was fixed after high level conferences on both sides of the...