Underground Barbie - Paperback

by Masa Kolanovic (Author), Ena Selimovic (Translator)

A darkly humorous coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Yugoslav Wars.

As air-raid sirens become commonplace, children in an apartment building escape into a world of Barbie dolls, improvising scenarios that mirror the splintering social structure of 1990s Yugoslavia. Innocence clashes with the horrors of war and the allure of Western consumerism.

Masa Kolanovic's Underground Barbie deftly captures the power of imagination to overcome hardship, offering a sharp critique of consumer culture amidst the ruins of a socialist experiment. Discover political campaigns defined by what it means to be a "real" Croatian, a refugee ball with "disgusting" dolls, and a mass grave of Ken's mistresses. For readers of literary fiction, social satire, and war stories.

Author Biography

Mas a Kolanovic is a multi-genre writer. Her works include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the lonely, 2001), the novel Slobos tina Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), and the short story collection Pos tovani kukci i druge jezive price (Dear pests and other chilling stories, 2019). The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb. Ena Selimovic is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, World Literary Today, PMLA, Reading in Translation, Balkanist, and others. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.Phil. in comparative literature from Trinity College Dublin. She is a cofounder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal.