A Muzzle for Witches

"Praise for Dubravka Ugresic: ""Splendidly ambitious. . . . A brilliant, enthralling spread of storytelling and high-velocity reflections. . . . She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.""--Susan Sontag ""A madcap wit and a lively sense of the absurd. . . . Filled with ingenious invention and surreal incident.""--Marina Warner ""Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives the wars in the former Yugoslavia produced. . . . This is an utterly original, beautiful, and supremely intelligent novel.""--Charles Simic ""Ugresic is also affecting and eloquent, in part because within her quirky, aggressively sweet plot she achieves moments of profundity and evokes the stoicism innate in such moments.""--Mary Gaitskill ""Never has a writer been more aware of how one narrative depends on another.""--Joanna Walsh ""Ugresic is unbeatable at explaining the inexplicable entanglements of Balkan cultural traditions, particularly as they relate to the hellish position of women.""--Clive James ""Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.""--New York Times ""Ugresic's recent work [is] veery Central European in form, a collage of essays, sketches, feuilletons, numbered aperçus, reminiscent of the best non-fiction of Danilo Kis or György Konrád. She is brave in denouncing the perversions of political and cultural life in Croatia, but also wonderfully ironical about the quasi-heroic roles in which she find herself now unwillingly cast. The book is subtle, funny, and clear-eyed.""--Timothy Garton-Ash"