American Fictionary

In the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugresicwinner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literaturewas 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 "e;strong personalities,"e; 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.