Sarajevo Marlboro

(Paperback)

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Miljenko Jergovic's remarkable d but collection of stories. A dazzling storyteller, this native of Sarajevo brings a profoundly human, razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city's young Muslims, Croats and Serbs with a subterranean humor and profoundly personal vision to his work. Their offbeat lives and daily dramas (straying into the likes and dislikes of a cactus, the history of locally blended cigarettes) are set against the deadly background of the Balkans war.

Reviews

Miljenko Jergovics Sarajevo Marlboro relies on minute details, such as a dead cactus and a grandmothers ring, to distinguish individuals numbed reactions to the devastation of the Bosnian war. Theres a melancholy, dreamlike sameness to Jergovics war stories that recalls Alan Lightmans use of time in Einsteins Dreams and Italo Calvinos meditations on place in Invisible Cities, but Jergovics 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

Praise for Kin:

Vast, generous-spirited story of family across the face of the 20th century in the turbulent Balkans . . . There is beauty aplenty, and ample monstrosity, in Jergovis account, as well as many moments of mystery: a beekeepers coded journal, the alpenglow that surrounds Sarajevo as surely as a besieging army, the living torment that is existence, all come under Jergovis empathetic eye. A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland.
Kirkus, starred review


[Jergovis] astonishing project offers endless rewards.
Publishers Weekly, starred review

A superb English translation . . . Kin is deeply interested in moments that trickle down through the years, and how, even when languages and the names of countries have changed, when wars have completely reshaped the region, these fleeting seconds have stayed rooted in a familys mind.
Sarah McEachern, The Los Angeles Review of Books


Part novel, part memoir, part philosophical discourse and part historical account, I couldn't wait to start reading this one every morning: Its peaks are some of the most bracing reading I've done in a decade. Highest recommendation.
John Darnielle

Author Bio

Miljenko Jergovi_x0107_ is a Bosnian and Croatian writer and journalist. One of the most significant Balkan writers of his generation, his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. His landmark collection of stories Sarajevo Marlboro received the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize. Mama Leone won the Premio Grinzane Cavour for the best foreign book in Italy in 2003. In 2012, he received the Angelus Central European Literature Award for Srda Sings At Dusk On Pentecost. His critically acclaimed autobiographical novel Kin earned starred reviews in both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Jergovi_x0107_ currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. Stela Tomasevic was born in Belgrade in 1963. She studied literature at the University of East Anglia. She has translated numerous works of non-fiction from the Bosnian and the French. She currently works for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia.