The Culture of Lies
Antipolitical Essays
288 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 | 1998
ISBN 978-0-271-01834-8 | cloth: $71.95 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-01847-8 | paper: $33.95 tr
Post-Communist Cultural Studies Series
For sale in the U.S. only
Winner of the 1999 Heldt Prize for Best Translation in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women's Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies
The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugresic's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.
With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.
Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.
Dubravka Ugresic taught for twenty years at the Institute for the Theory of Literature at Zagreb University. Since 1993 she has lived in exile in Amsterdam and frequently lectures in the United States. Three of her books have been translated into English: Have a Nice Day (1994), In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories (1993), and Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1993).