Set in 1968 Leipzig, Christoph Hein's novel is the story of Dallow, an apolitical academic who has just returned to civilian life after serving twenty-one months in prison. His crime: he was the substitute piano player in a student cabaret in which seditious verses were sung. Dallow returns to a life in of loveless sex, police harassment, and brutality, revealing how a corrupt system perverts all human interaction, and how lives are ruined by malicious caprice.

In cool, precise prose, and with an unerring sense of the absurd, Norman Manea's four novellas create a picture of everyday life in a grotesque police state, expressing terror and hope, fear and solidarity, the humorous triviality of the ordinary, and the painful search for an ideal.

In these two novellas, Volodymyr Dibrova tells the story of how the Soviet system was sustained by individuals who never truly believed in it, but simply lacked the courage to oppose it.
Peltse portrays the formation of an average apparatchik. Both funny and alarming, it provides a psychological portrait of an individual trapped in a system he simultaneously dislikes and depends upon for survival. Pentameron tells the story of one day in the life of five colleagues at a Soviet research institute. Each is dissatisfied, yet all are trapped in and by a system that has taken...

Martin and Tomas leave Prague on Christmas Day for "that other country." Although their destination is the mountains, their departure has been initiated by a search for their own identity--people in their country have become alike, losing their individuality and becoming products of a totalitarian regime. The pair become the guests of a high school teacher, but Martin falls in love with the teacher's daughter only to lose her in a police suppression, and the Other Country is revealed as a merciless machine of oppression that throws its people into despair.

One of the best-known novels by prolific Romanian avant-garde writer Gelu Naum, Zenobia is the evocation of the singular quest of a Surrealist knight-errant who strives to be true to the gentle demands of his lady in a landscape of snares, desolation, incipient madness, and material poverty magically interrupted by moments of extreme beauty.
His wife, artist Lyggia Naum, was the inspiration for the title character. In this 1985 masterpiece, penned in the twilight of the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, love, in all its intimate, carnal communion, lights the path through...

Death and the Dervish is an acclaimed novel by Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Turkish authorities in his search to discover what happened to him. He narrates his story in the form of an elaborate suicide note, regularly misquoting the Koran. In time, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life...

David Albahari is one of the most prominent prose writers to come out of the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His short stories, which developed largely outside the canon of Serbian literature, have influenced a generation of Balkan writers. This collection gathers Albahari's best and most important stories, moving from an early preoccupation with the family and Central European culture to metafictional searches for the roots of his identity.

This collection first appeared as a special issue of "Storm, " the British literary journal of new eastern European writing. Joanna Labon has selected excellent, timely essays, stories, drama, and prose by exiled or silenced members of the Yugoslav intelligentsia.
Contributors: Dubravka Ugresic, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Dragan Velikic, Danilo Kis, Drago Jancar, Mirko Kovac, Goran Stefanovski, Dzevad Karahasan, and Slobodan Blagojevic.

Popov's short stories move from the village prose genre into the territory of the grotesque via the stark reality of late Soviet life. The Russia of Merry-making in Old Russia and Other Stories is variously the Russia of Siberia, of a peasant hut, or of a decaying Moscow factory workshop. In a landscape peopled by sympathetic yet stunned characters caught between the harsh routine of everyday existence and the trappings of the modern world, these men and women resort to vodka and to tall tales, and to physical and verbal abuse, to dull the pain of the dehumanizing Soviet regime that is their...