The fictional masterpieces of the great Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis-Hourglass: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich: Garden, Ashes; and The Encyclopedia of the Dead - established him as a figure of incomparable originality and eloquence in the spectrum of contemporary European literature. With this posthumous selection from his non-fiction made by Susan Sontag, who was a friend of Kis, the English-language reader will be able to admire an equally original, more polemical aspect of Kis's genius.

Here is Kis on nationalism as kitsch and collective paranoia, on the dilemmas of a Central European identity, on the dangers of censorship, on literature's struggle against banality, as well as on writers as different as Nabokov and Sade.