In the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic--winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature--was invited to Middletown, Connecticut as a guest lecturer. A world away from the brutal sieges of Sarajevo and the nationalist rhetoric of Milosevic, she instead has to cope with everyday life in America, where she's assaulted by "strong personalities," the cult of the body, endless amounts of jogging and exercise, bagels, and an obsession with public confession. Organized as a fictional dictionary, these early essays of Ugresic's (revised and amended for this edition) allow us to see American culture through the eyes of a woman whose country is being destroyed by war, and forces us to see through the comforting veil of Western consumerism.

Author Biography

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work. Celia Hawkesworth is the translator of numerous works of Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian literature, including Dubravka Ugresic's The Culture of Lies for which she won the Heldt Prize for Translation in 1999. Ellen Elias-Bursac is a translator of South Slavic literature. Her accolades include the 2006 National Translation Award for her translation of David Albahari's novel G tz and Meyer. She is currently the Vice President of the American Literary Translators Association.