Shopping For A Better Country

A collection of narrative essays on family, history, and travel from Croation American Josip Novakovich, a Whiting Writers' Award winner and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Having left his homeland of Yugoslavia, leaving behind kin and community, the author here captures significant portraits of what is lost, what is remembered, and what remains. Within those moments of fresh clarity of the past are the instances of repeated culture shock that never seem to lose their harsh edges.

Josip Novakovich teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal and has published "Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust" (Harper Perennial, 2005), "April Fool's Day" (HarperCollins, 2004 (published in ten countries, including UK, Turkey, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Russia, Hungary)), two story collections, "Yolk" (Graywolf Press), and "Salvation and Other Disasters" (Graywolf Press), a collection of narrative essays, "Apricots from Chernobyl" (Graywolf Press), and has been anthologized in "Best American Poetry" (1997). He is working at becoming a citizen of his fourth country (Yugoslavia, Croatia, United States, and now Canada). The shopping has taken him to Canada.

"The writing answers for itself, with remarkable stories of undeniable joy and strange optimism...These moments are funny and bizarre, but never scolding -- a keenly observed world of strangeness, melancholy, and cruelty...Novakovich, one of the most forceful and original essayists in the English language."--"Los Angeles Review of Books"