Europe in Sepia

Hurtling between Weltschmerz & wit, drollness & diatribe, entropy & enchantment, it's the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic's writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her "the fantasy cultural studies professor you never had." In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the flâneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zuccotti Park, the Irish Aran Islands to Jerusalem's Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.

Infused with compassion & melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of irreducible nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by the levity of Ugresic's raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has seldom been so beguiling. 

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Dubravka Ugresic was a writer of novels (Baba Yaga Laid An Egg, The Ministry of Pain), short story collections (Lend Me Your Character, In the Jaws of Life, Karaoke Culture) & books of essays (Nobody’s Home, Thank You for Not Reading, The Culture of Lies). In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work. She died in March 2023.

David Williams did his doctoral research on the post-Yugoslav writings of Dubravka Ugresic & the idea of a "literature of the Eastern European ruins." He is the author of Writing Postcommunism.