Shopping for a Better Country

by Josip Novakovich

Overview

A collection of narrative essays on family, history, and travel from Croation American Josip Novakovich, a Whiting Writers' Award winner and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Having fled his homeland of Yugoslavia, leaving behind kin and community, the author here captures significant portraits of what is lost, what is remembered, and what remains. Within those moments of fresh clarity of the past are the instances of repeated culture shock that never seem to lose their harsh edges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936873289
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	05/08/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
File size:	288 KB

About the Author

Josip Novakovich: Josip Novakovich teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and has published Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust (HarperPerennial, 2005) April Fool's Day , HarperCollins, 2004 (published in ten countries, including UK, Turkey, Japan, Canada, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Hungary), two story collections, Yolk, (Graywolf Press) and Salvation and Other Disasters, (Graywolf Press) a collection of narrative essays, Apricots from Chernobyl, (Graywolf Press) and has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, (1997). He is currently working on becoming a citizen of his fourth country (Yugoslavia, Croatia, U.S., and Canada).

Table of Contents

Shopping for a Better Country 1

Dead Fathers Society 16

Terrible Twos Travel 24

Ruth's Death 34

On Raising a Prodigy 67

Five Easy Pieces in Moscow 78

Sumka 43-A Captive Cello 90

Blue Note 106

The Art of Coughing 111

On Sleeping 120

Friendship Addiction 125

Carthage, Algiers, and Fes 139

My Hungary 152

Vukovar 165

Two Croatias 175

Berlin Journal 179

Why I Can't Write Erotica 198

Literary Tombs 205

Balkan Express 217

Acknowledgments 227