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  • Published: 15 December 2014
  • ISBN: 9780972869225
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 195
  • RRP: $35.00

Sarajevo Marlboro



A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” (Richard Flanagan) from Croatian writer Miljenko Jergović, whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon
 
Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable début collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs – the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.

  • Published: 15 December 2014
  • ISBN: 9780972869225
  • Imprint: Archipelago
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 195
  • RRP: $35.00

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Praise for Sarajevo Marlboro

Read this book: at Sarajevo many died and the twenty first century was born. These spare tales speak of all that may yet befall us if we forget our essential fragility; by showing that while what unites us is undeniable, what we allow to divide us too easily becomes murderous. This classic of anti-war writing is a warning about the immense human cost of following those who would have us hate others. Its US publication could not be more timely.
-- Richard Flanagan

Like all great war books, Sarajevo Marlboro is not about war--it's about life. Jergovic is an enormously talented storyteller, so the people under siege come through in all their poignant fullness. And one more thing: this book does not belong to the literature of complaining, much too common these days--Sarajevo Marlboro is a book for the people who appreciate life.
-- Aleksandar Hemon

Reading Miljenko Jergovic's Sarajevo Marlboro is like wrapping yourself in a quilt of 29 patches, with each patch personalizing the horrors of the Bosnian War in ways that are engaging, humorous, and unendingly sad. If we are ever to learn to avoid carnage it will be through such acts of constant humanizing as are captured in Jergovic's amazing work.
-- Richard Wiley