Nobody's Home

"Croatian novelist/essayist Ugresic (The Ministry of Pain, 2006, etc.), now a resident of Amsterdam, offers discerning, sometimes grumpy commentary on a rapidly changing Europe--and a rapidly changing world ... Taut, timely pieces by a writer who sees the cosmic in the quotidian."--Kirkus Reviews

"Dubravka Ugresic is Walter Benjamin's Baudelaire, the poetic sojourner who finds himself at the whim of the crowd. She is the flaneur cast into the streets, nowhere at home. And like Baudelaire, Ugresic is a writer in full view of and at odds with the forces of commodity culture, a writer whose mission is to give form to modernity. But if Baudelaire's poetry is permeated by melancholic doom, Ugresic's diagnosis of life's illusory qualities is delightfully judgmental and cheerily pessimistic. Or as she tartly concludes in Nobody's Home, her new collection of essays, 'this book breaks the rules of good behavior, because it bickers.'"--NIcole Rudick, Bookforum

"Nobody's Home is a collection of essays that offers life from the exile's point of view, with all its tragic absurdities."--June Avignone, University of Rochester Currents

"This book is part memoir, part shrewd observation, part travel writing at its best. Each section opens with a loving quotation from the Russian satirists Ilf and Petrov, and Ugresic writes with something of their impish genius."--Telegraph