CEERES of Voices: Dubravka Ugresic - "American Fictionary" & "Fox" - Nada Petković

Dubravka Ugresic discusses American Fictionary and Fox. She will be joined in conversation by Nada Petkovic. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with CEERES, the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago

At 57th Street Books

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About American Fictionary: In the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic—winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature—was invited to Middletown, Connecticut as a guest lecturer. A world away from the brutal sieges of Sarajevo and the nationalist rhetoric of Milošević, she instead has to cope with everyday life in America, where she's assaulted by "strong personalities," the cult of the body, endless amounts of jogging and exercise, bagels, and an obsession with public confession. Organized as a fictional dictionary, these early essays of Ugresic's (revised and amended for this edition) allow us to see American culture through the eyes of a woman whose country is being destroyed by war, and forces us to see through the comforting veil of Western consumerism.

About Fox: Fox is the story of literary footnotes and “minor” characters―unnoticed people propelled into timelessness through the biographies and novels of others. With Ugresic’s characteristic wit, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, betrayal, and the randomness of human lives.

About the author: Over the past three decades, Dubravka Ugresic has established herself as one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists. From her early postmodernist excursions, to her elegiac reckonings in fiction and the essay with the disintegration of her Yugoslav homeland and the fall of the Berlin Wall, through to her more recent writings on popular and literary culture, Ugresic’s work is marked by a rare combination of irony, polemic, and compassion.

Following degrees in Comparative and Russian Literature, Ugresic worked for many years at the University of Zagreb’s Institute for Theory of Literature, successfully pursuing parallel careers as both a writer and as a scholar. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugresic took a firm anti-war stance, critically dissecting retrograde Croatian and Serbian nationalism, the stupidity and criminality of war, and in the process became a target for nationalist journalists, politicians and fellow writers. Subjected to prolonged public ostracism and persistent media harassment, she left Croatia in 1993.

In an exile that has in time become emigration, her books have been translated into over twenty languages. She has taught at a number of American and European universities, including Harvard, UCLA, Columbia and the Free University of Berlin. She is the winner of several major literary prizes (Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1998; finalist of Man Booker International Prize 2009; Jean Améry Essay Prize, awarded for her essayistic work as a whole, 2012; while Karaoke Culture was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 2011). In 2016 Dubravka Ugresic has been awarded Vilenica Prize and Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Ugresic lives in Amsterdam.

About the interlocutor: Nada Petković is a Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Her teaching focuses on second-language acquisition, sociolinguistics, regional ethnography and literature, urban studies, and social theory. A native of Belgrade, Former Yugoslavia, she is the recipient of many distinguished honors, including a Fulbright Visiting Scholar grant that brought her to Chicago.

About the series: CEERES, pronounced /ˈsirēz/, is the acronym for the University of Chicago Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies. Together with the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, we are delighted to announce the launch of the CEERES of Voices Event Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations on books from or about Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Caucasus. The books being discussed are identified in a various ways: through publishers’ contacts with the bookstore or through faculty requests to CEERES to host the author.