A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

Slavenka Drakulic A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

PENGUIN BOOKS. A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM

SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ was born in Croatia in 1949. Her nonfiction books include How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a feminist critique of Communism that brought her to the attention of the public in the West; The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War, a personal eyewitness account of the war in her homeland; Café Europa: Life After Communism (Penguin); and

They Would Never Hurt a Fly (Penguin). Drakulić is also the author of the novels Holograms of Fear, which was a bestseller in Yugoslavia and was short-listed for The Best Foreign Book Award by The Independent (UK), The Marble Skin, The Taste of a Man (Penguin), S. (Penguin), and Frida’s Bed (Penguin). A writer and journalist who was published in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Book Review, and The Nation

(where she is a contributing editor), as well as many other European magazines and newspapers, she now lives in Sweden and Croatia.

Advance Praise for A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

“Orwell taught us in Animal Farm that a satirical fable could introduce us to Stalinism. For our own postcommunist age, Slavenka Drakulić summons her own group of animals, each with its own literary genre, and each with a story to tell about life in a communist country. The mouse and the mole, the pig and the parrot, the raven and the bear, the cat and the dog, all seek and find ways to remind us of a time and place, and so teach us the difference between stale commemoration of the graying past and the warmth and wetness and dread and darkness of life truly and bravely recalled. This daring triumph of literary style transforms a receding epoch into the eternal present, beautifully rendering the dilemmas of life under communism as sharp instances of moral tragedy and poignant examples of the limits of self-knowledge. Literature here is an aide de memoire, not just of historical experience, but of why we choose to forget.”

— Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Praise for Café Europa: Life After Communism

“Profound and often bitingly funny. you’ll never think about capitalism, modern history, or your perfect, white, American teeth in the same way again.”

— Elle

ʺInsightful. Café Europa not only helps to illuminate the political and social problems facing most of Eastern Europe, but also sheds new light on the daily life of its residents, their emotional habits, fears, and dreams. Moving and eloquent.”

— The New York Times

“Where less sensitive observers might only bemoan the legacy of communism, Drakulić knows her people well and sees the redeeming nature of all their human frailty; for their sake, we should read her book.”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“An important and timely book that deserves the widest possible audience.”

— Chicago Tribune

Praise for They Would Never Hurt a Fly

“In this powerful series of reports from The Hague’s international courtroom, Slavenka Drakulić confronts the Yugoslav war’s grand villains and banal perpetrators as she fearlessly contemplates both the individual character of evil and the tragic, chillingly impersonal mechanisms of war. Writing with her hallmark blend of forthrightness, open-eyed irony, and psychological discernment, Drakulić gives us disturbingly intimate vignettes of war criminals who might have been her own (and our) neighbors, even as she illuminates one of our time’s most daunting and urgent questions: How ordinary men and women turn, and are turned, into genocidal killers. An important and a necessary book.”

— Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation and After Such Knowledge

“In the first in-depth look at the war crimes trials in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić has written a deeply personal and lucid account. She brings to life the men who destroyed Yugoslavia — mediocre people who committed extraordinary crimes.”

— Laura Silber, coauthor of Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation

“Lucidly written. a devastating book. [Drakulić’s] direct, personal style does justice to the weight and grimness of these stories.”