Books from Serbia

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic takes the form of an encyclopedia rather than a conventional novel. It gathers entries about the Khazars, a real people who held power in the region beyond Transylvania roughly between the seventh and ninth centuries. The book is organized into three smaller dictionaries, each reflecting the perspective of one of the three major monotheistic religions. Entries move freely between historical periods, and readers can approach them in almost any order.

The novel was published in two separate editions, labeled male and female. The two versions are nearly identical, differing by only seventeen lines. Within its entries, the book presents three scholars whose work intersects across centuries, a princess of uncertain origin, a religious sect capable of entering dreams, a book whose pages are printed in poisonous ink, and relationships that cross the boundary between the living and the dead. Pavic, a Serbian writer, structured the work so that each reading path through the entries can produce a slightly different experience of the story.

The book became a national bestseller and was named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of its year. Pavic's approach treats the encyclopedia format itself as a storytelling device, letting fragments of myth, theology, and historical speculation accumulate across its pages.

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An unnamed narrator in Zoran Zivkovic's Hidden Camera receives a blank envelope slipped into his apartment door. Inside is an invitation to a private film screening. When he arrives at the theater, only one other person is present: a woman he does not know, seated beside him. The film itself contains footage of him sitting in a park, apparently recorded without his knowledge or consent.

Convinced he has been drawn into an elaborate hidden-camera prank, the narrator decides to play along. Each new setup he encounters grows stranger and more layered than the last, pushing further into absurdity. As the situations multiply, his willingness to cooperate starts to conflict with a deepening sense of paranoia. He begins to distrust not only the people around him but the very nature of what is happening to him.

Zivkovic is a Serbian writer known for compact, speculative fiction that operates in the space between the everyday and the surreal. Hidden Camera sits in that territory, using the familiar concept of surveillance entertainment as a starting point and then steadily bending it. The story raises questions about observation, performance, and the line between participation and manipulation.

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Serbian Cooking by Danijela Kracun is a compact collection of recipes drawn from traditional Serbian and broader Balkan food customs. The book gathers around fifty recipes spanning soups, salads, sauces, filled pastry dishes known as pita, and a variety of desserts including baklava, crepes, and cream puffs. A notable share of the recipes are vegetarian, though the author notes that meat can be added according to personal preference.

The collection reflects how Serbian cuisine shares ingredients and techniques with the cooking of neighboring countries across the Balkans and wider Eastern Europe. Readers familiar with Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, or Bosnian kitchens may recognize certain preparations in slightly different form. The book also touches on everyday Serbian eating patterns, where the main meal of the day is lunch rather than dinner. Evening meals tend to be light, often just cold cuts and bread, while an afternoon pastry with coffee fills the gap between the two. These small details of daily routine give context to the recipes and help explain why certain dishes, particularly baked goods and hearty midday plates, hold the place they do in Serbian households.

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The Cyclist Conspiracy follows a secret Brotherhood whose members communicate through dreams, draw obscure wisdom from the bicycle, and attempt to slip in and out of historical events to alter their course. The conspiracy is so enormous and so hidden that many of its own participants do not realize they belong to it. Serbian author Svetislav Basara constructs the novel as a collection of supposed historical documents: memoirs, letters, philosophical essays, blueprints, maps, and illustrations, each one adding a new layer to the Brotherhood's strange interventions across time.

The scope of those interventions stretches from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to a fictional lost case involving Sherlock Holmes. Basara uses this wide range to blur the line between documented history and invention, treating both with the same deadpan authority. The result is a comic and conspiratorial fiction where no document can be fully trusted and where the bicycle itself becomes an unlikely vessel for secret knowledge. The novel's fragmented structure keeps the reader assembling the picture from mismatched pieces, much like a puzzle whose final shape remains deliberately uncertain.

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As a child, Albert Weiss was thrown from a train bound for Auschwitz by his parents, who hoped to save him and his brother from the camp. He survived, but his brother was lost that winter night. The novel follows Albert years later as he tries to understand what happened to him and to locate some way of living with the knowledge of what was done to his family and to millions of others.

Filip David, a Serbian writer, constructs the story in a mosaic, non-linear form. The narrative moves between times and perspectives, drawing on semi-autobiographical elements. Other survivors appear throughout, each carrying a different method of confronting or enduring the past. Albert's struggle is shaped not only by the original violence but by a persistent guilt over his brother's fate, a weight that shifts but does not simply resolve.

The book has been compared in structure to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and in its subject matter to the writings of Primo Levi. Both comparisons point to the same territory: fiction that addresses large-scale atrocity through fractured, personal memory rather than conventional chronology.

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The Encyclopedia of the Dead is a collection of short stories by Danilo Kiš, originally published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983. It was his final work of fiction. The stories move across different centuries and locations, blending documented history with invented detail. In the title story, an enormous encyclopedia records the lives of every ordinary person who has lived since 1789, people too unremarkable to appear in any standard reference work. Other stories follow a young woman who glimpses a terrible vision in a mirror acquired from a traveling seller, and a city shaken by unrest after the death of a woman on its margins.

Kiš was born in Subotica in 1935 and grew up in a region shaped by successive occupations and border changes. His writing often returned to the relationship between individual memory and official record, between what states preserve and what they erase. In this collection, he sets comedy beside horror and compresses large historical spans into brief, precise narratives.

The stories share a persistent interest in how the dead are remembered or forgotten, and in the thin boundary between factual report and storytelling. Kiš structures several pieces as mock documents or scholarly entries, giving fiction the surface texture of archival material.

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In an unnamed Balkan country recovering from war, Natalia, a young doctor, learns that her grandfather has died under unclear circumstances far from home. Trying to understand his final days, she revisits the stories he once shared with her, particularly his accounts of a wandering figure he called the deathless man, someone who claimed to be immortal. Her grandfather was a rational, science-minded person, which makes his apparent pursuit of this figure all the more puzzling to Natalia.

Alongside the present-day search, the novel opens into layered tales from the grandfather's past. One strand follows his childhood encounters with a tiger that escaped into his village and the local woman connected to the animal. Another traces his repeated crossings with the deathless man across decades of Balkan conflict and change. Téa Obreht builds the narrative by moving between these stories and Natalia's own medical work in a post-war border region, where she is vaccinating orphaned children.

Kipling's The Jungle Book appears as a recurring object. The grandfather's battered copy serves as a personal talisman and a thread linking his early life to the mysteries Natalia tries to piece together. The book's structure relies on folklore, family memory, and the gaps between what one generation tells and what the next must discover alone.

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The Use of Man is set in Novi Sad, a multiethnic city on the Danube near the border between what was then Yugoslavia and Hungary. Before the Second World War, a group of high-school classmates share lessons, friendships, and the ordinary concerns of youth. Among them are Vera, who is half Jewish and of German background; her boyfriend Milinko, a Serb; their friend Sredoje; and their German tutor, referred to as Fräulein. The novel opens near the end of the war, as Sredoje returns to Novi Sad as a Partisan fighter and discovers Fräulein's diary in Vera's abandoned house.

War scatters the group along violently different paths. Vera is sent to a concentration camp. Her cousin Sep joins the Nazis. Milinko enters the resistance. Sredoje adapts to the chaos by becoming a killer. Aleksandar Tišma traces each of these trajectories with close, unsentimental attention, showing how the same small city and the same circle of young people can produce collaborators, victims, resisters, and perpetrators.

When the war ends, survival itself proves difficult to inhabit. Tišma writes about both the open brutality of wartime and the quieter damage that persists afterward, observing his characters with steady precision rather than sentiment. The novel was originally published in Serbian and later translated into several languages.

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Marina Abramović grew up in postwar Yugoslavia, the daughter of two partisan veterans celebrated under Tito's government. Her mother imposed strict discipline, including a nightly curfew that Abramović obeyed even as an adult already exhibiting work internationally. The memoir traces her path from Belgrade through decades of performance art, a practice in which the artist's own body and endurance serve as the medium. Abramović's pieces have frequently involved physical extremity, testing the boundaries of pain, fatigue, and fear as a means of reaching altered emotional states.

A central thread of the book is her twelve-year partnership with the German-born artist Ulay. The two lived and worked together with very little money, often traveling across Europe in a van. Their collaboration shaped some of Abramović's best-known works, and the memoir follows the relationship from its beginning through its gradual unraveling.

The book also covers her 2010 MoMA retrospective, where she sat silently across from visitors one at a time in a durational performance lasting over 700 hours. More than 750,000 people attended the exhibition. Throughout, Abramović recounts events with a dry humor she attributes to her Balkan upbringing.

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