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This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosy times when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster—we drank and laughed and experimented with poetic forms into the late hours. We tried to keep the war away from the Table, but now and then a budding Serbian patriot would start ra…

I met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a café called Dom pisaca, or Writers’ Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers’ Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely co…

The same day, Mother washed the denim pants I had worn in Murska Sobota, with the pill in the change pocket disintegrating—nothing was left except a nugget of foil and plastic. The freezer chest arrived after seventeen days. We filled it to the brim: veal and pork, lamb and beef, chicken and pepper…

She shut the door and locked it twice. Clearly, I had not said the right word; I was very drunk and had not considered this outcome. I thought that we had connected, that the electricity had started flowing between our trembling bodies. Swaying before the cruelly and unnecessarily closed door, I ra…

It was in Murska Sobota that I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues sug…