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Sarajevo Blues
Sarajevo Blues
by Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Translated from the Bosnian by Ammiel Alcalay
0-87286-345-X
Paperback
$12.95




From one of Bosnia's most prominent poets and writers: spare and haunting stories and poems that were written under the horrific circumstances of the recent war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Sarajevo Blues was originally published at the end of 1992 and was the first book in the Biblioteka "egzil-abc" series, published in Ljubljana, which provided a forum for Bosnian writers and translators under siege or living in exile. Semezdin Mehmedinovic says that "writing is, finally, quite a personal thing that doesn't make much sense unless you are practicing for the last word." For those Bosnians emerging from the siege or still in exile, these "last words" remain intimate possessions, one of the last bastions left against the commodification of tragedy.

" Sarajevo Blues is at once a battle report and a philosophical investigation. In poems, micro-essays, and prose vignettes, Semezdin Mehmedinovic charts the collapse of a world with heart-breaking clarity and precision." - Paul Auster

Semezdin Mehmedinovic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1960 and is the author of four books. In 1993 he was cowriter and codirector, with Benjamin Filipovic, of Mizaldo, one of the first Bosnian films shot during the war. The film was presented at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994, and won the first prize at the Mediterranean Festival in Rome the following year. He, his wife, and their child left Bosnia and came to the U.S. as polical refugees in 1996.

Ammiel Alcalay is a writer, translator, and scholar; he teaches at Queens College in New York and is the author of After Jews and Arabs (City Lights), The Cairo Notebooks, and Keys to the Garden (City Lights).

James Brook is a poet and the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights) and the translator of many works, including My Tired Father by Gellu Naum and Panegyric by Guy Debord

Chris Carlsson, former editor of Processed World and Bad Attitude, is the producer of Shaping San Francisco, a multimedia, digital companion to this book. See www.shapingsf.org for more information.

Nancy J. Peters is the copublisher of City Lights Books.




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