From the Editor's Foreword: "Without any doubt, the 1990s will long be remembered as the decade of Yugoslavia's prolonged disintegration. A virtual blueprint of the conflict is accessible to anyone in a position to track the independent print media that were then emerging in Yugoslavia's various republics."Publishing in Yugoslavia's Successor States presents the results of extensive tracking and research in that area. You'll learn how weekly independent news magazines such as Mladina in Slovenia, Danas in Croatia, and, later, Vreme in Serbia courageously documented the centrifugal political forces at work in Yugoslavia at the time. Independent daily newspapers, often located in provincial cities away form the centers of political control, pursued similar policies, adhering to high standards of objective political coverage. The periodical press also weighed in over time with more reflective assessments of the area's evolving political crisis and recommendations for managing it. Finally, as Yugoslavia's old communist paradigm of information management gradually lost control, the market gave rise to numerous tabloid weeklies and dailies that banked on nationalism and fear, serving as handmaidens to media-savvy demagogues and helping to rekindle past rivalries. Publishing in Yugoslavia's Successor States will take you on a turbulent tour of this vital industry struggling to survive and thrive in a war-torn land.

Boris Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau, and Natzweiler. His fellow prisoners comprised a veritable microcosm of Europe Italians, French, Russians, Dutch, Poles, Germans. Twenty years later, when he visits a camp in the Vosges Mountains that has been preserved as a historical monument, images of his experiences come back to him: corpses being carried to the ovens; emaciated prisoners in wooden clogs and ragged, zebra-striped uniforms, struggling up the steps of a quarry or standing at roll call in the cold rain; the infirmary, reeking of dysentery and death. Necropolis is Pahor s stirring account of his attempts to provide medical aid to prisoners in the face of the utter brutality of the camps and of his coming to terms with the ineradicable guilt he feels, having survived when millions did not.

From the Editor's Foreword: "Without any doubt, the 1990s will long be remembered as the decade of Yugoslavia's prolonged disintegration. A virtual blueprint of the conflict is accessible to anyone in a position to track the independent print media that were then emerging in Yugoslavia's various republics."Publishing in Yugoslavia's Successor States presents the results of extensive tracking and research in that area. You'll learn how weekly independent news magazines such as Mladina in Slovenia, Danas in Croatia, and, later, Vreme in Serbia courageously documented the centrifugal political forces at work in Yugoslavia at the time. Independent daily newspapers, often located in provincial cities away form the centers of political control, pursued similar policies, adhering to high standards of objective political coverage. The periodical press also weighed in over time with more reflective assessments of the area's evolving political crisis and recommendations for managing it. Finally, as Yugoslavia's old communist paradigm of information management gradually lost control, the market gave rise to numerous tabloid weeklies and dailies that banked on nationalism and fear, serving as handmaidens to media-savvy demagogues and helping to rekindle past rivalries. Publishing in Yugoslavia's Successor States will take you on a turbulent tour of this vital industry struggling to survive and thrive in a war-torn land.

I Saw Her That Night, a love story in time of war, is a novel about a few years in the life and mysterious disappearance of Veronika Zarnik, a young bourgeois woman from Ljubljana, sucked into the whirlwind of a turbulent period in history. We follow her story from the perspective of five different characters, who also talk about themselves, as well as the troubled Slovenian times before and during World War II; times that swallowed, like a Moloch, not only the people of various beliefs involved in historical events, but also those who lived on the fringes of tumultuous events, which they did not even fully comprehend-they only wanted to live. But "only" to live was an illusion: it was a time when, even under the seemingly safe and idyllic shelter of a manor house in Slovenia, it was impossible to avoid the rushing train of violence.

Designed as a historical novel, The Masochist forges an intimate portrait of a young, tenacious woman who, in uncertain times at the end of the 19th century, chose an uncertain path - the only path that could lead her to freedom. On Christmas Eve 1874, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whom history would remember as the most famous masochist, left his home in Bruck an der Mur in Austria for the unknown. The novel surmises he didn't come back alone, but brought with him a new family member: a tiny red-haired girl he found in the forests around Lemberg/ Lviv. The Masochist is the memoir of Nadezhda Moser, the woman this little girl becomes, a fictional character who forces her way among the historical figures of the time.

A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, "The Master of Insomnia" is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the 'big picture' will inevitably overlook the essential... Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction."

Boris Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Bergen-Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau and Natzweiler-Struthof. Twenty years later, as he visited the preserved remains of a camp, his experiences came back to him: the emaciated prisoners; the ragged, zebra-striped uniforms; the infirmary reeking of dysentery and death. Necropolis is Pahor's stirring account of providing medical aid to prisoners in the face of the utter brutality of the camps - and coming to terms with the guilt of surviving when millions did not. It is a classic account of the Holocaust and a powerful act of remembrance.

Poetry. Tomaz Salamun is perhaps the most popular and prolific poet in Central Europe today. Thanks to the translation of his work he has also been widely acclaimed abroad. To date he has had four collections of selected poetry published in English. A BALLAD FOR METKA KRASOVEC, originally published in the 1980s by Harcourt, at the mid-point of Salamun's career, is considered by the author to be one of his finest works. The volume is characterized by often striking imagery and sexual turmoil. It is the first complete single volume of his to appear in English translation. The translator is Michael Biggins, who is a Slavic and East European Studies librarian at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle. SPD also carries Salamun's FOUR QUESTIONS OF MELANCHOLY (White Pine).

With its echoes of fellow Austrian novelist Robert Musil's novella Young T?rless, and of G?nter Grass's The Tin Drum, Florjan Lipuš's "Young Tjaž," first published in 1972, helped moved the critique of Germanic Europe's fundamental social conformity into the postwar age.