Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia Paperback – November 1, 2003 by Dubravka Ugresic

Description

Author: Ugresic Dubravka

Brand: Dalkey Archive Press

Edition: First English Edition

Package Dimensions: 20x213x318

Number Of Pages: 221

Release Date: 01-11-2003

Details: Product Description
“A brilliant, enthralling spread of story-telling and high-velocity reflections . . . Ugresic is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.” Susan Sontag
From Publishers Weekly
In the bustling Anglo-American literary marketplace, the Eastern European exile doesn’t stand a chance, says Ugresic (Have a Nice Day), herself in self-exile from Croatia. “The literary market demands that people adapt to the norms of production. As a rule, it does not tolerate disobedient artists, it does not tolerate experimenters, artistic subversives, performers of strange strategies in a literary text.” Instead, it rewards the artistically obedient. Furthermore, Ugresic complains, literature has lost the exclusiveness it once had. Since the market determines what is good and what is bad based purely on what sells, the door has opened for every two-bit celebrity to hock their wares in mega-bookstores, leaving “real” writers out in the cold. The author compares herself to Eeyore, the famous grumbler, but the tone of this collection can be fickle-is the author playfully grumbling or bitterly mocking? In “GW, the Gloomy Writer” and “The Magnificent Buli,” she mocks two types who have entered the global literary market: the male Eastern European writer with an inferiority complex and the genius/literary bulimic. In another piece, Ugresic playfully decries a marketplace that allows an empty personality like Ivana Trump to become a published author. At times, the analysis focuses so intently on the superficial business of marketing books that it overlooks the quiet intellectual activity that energizes English departments all across the United States, those little enclaves where Ivana Trump’s output makes nary a ripple. And since an academic audience frustrated with the commodification of books is the primary target for these essays, that feels like a significant omission.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives the wars in former Yugoslavia produced . . . This is an utterly original, beautiful and supremely intelligent novel.” (Charles Simic)

“Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.” (Washington Post)

“Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.” (The New York Times)
About the Author
An acclaimed novelist and essayist, Dubravka Ugresic is a native of the former Yugoslavia who left her homeland in 1993 for political reasons. She now lives in Amsterdam.

Celia Hawkesworth taught Serbian and Croatian language and literature at the University of London for many years. She now works as a freelance writer and translator. Her long involvement with the language and culture of the region began with her first visit to Zagreb in 1955.