Basements and Other Museums

Book excerpt: "With the precision of a surgeon and a poet's reverberant intelligence, Vedran Husic gives us stories of children growing up in war-ravaged Bosnia, a world of vanishing fathers, games invented around an alley sniper's bullets and the bittersweet aspirations of adolescent Bosnian immigrants and refugees in America. In taut yet voluptuous prose, with philosophic ferocity, BASEMENTS AND OTHER MUSEUMS marks the debut of a crucial new voice in contemporary fiction." -Melissa Pritchard "In an age of conformity, this is a writer who boldly stands apart. Language is unfixed. Time is stretched like taffy. The sniper's finger drifts to the trigger as the tale is told. When history, society, and culture conspire toward collapse, all we have left is language-Vedran Husic knows this. He is the natural heir to Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, Gombrovicz: stylists and story-tellers battered by war." -Matthew Neill Null