Best Balkan Book

Café Europa by Slavenka Drakulic is an amazing book. It’s a series of short essays written by a Croatian woman about post-communist life in a broadly defined Balkans (the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania). It explains why people don’t smile, why people still go on shopping vacations, how former Yugoslavs think their superior to all other former communist peoples, why it is impossible to find a decent public bathroom in all of Romania, etc. etc. Packed with cultural information that I anticipate to be much more helpful in my everyday Serbian existence than details of hundreds of years old battles (although I anticipate those being mighty important as well, depending on who I am talking to).