Underground Barbie Slobotina Barbie Maa Kolanovic Ena Selimovi Translation by Maša Kolanovic, Ena Selimović (translation) 9789533515120, 9533515120 instant download after payment.

As the frequency of air-raid sirens sending an apartment building's residents to the basement increases, the neighbor children block out reality with the toys at hand— some imported from Western Europe & North America, others regional knockoffs or questionably improvised. Maša Kolanovic's Underground Barbie brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news & the intrigues of sexual curiosity. The idealized glamour of Barbie & Ken on an endless honeymoon morphs into make-believe scenarios that reflect the splintering social structure brought about by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: politicians campaigning to define what it means to be a "real" Croatian, a refugee ball with "disgusting" dolls that are lesser than "genuine" Barbie products, the discovery of a mass grave filled with headless corpses thought to be Ken's mistresses.

Underground Barbie deftly renders the power of imagination to overcome hardship alongside a sharp critique of consumer culture, made even more stark against the shredded backdrop of a great socialist experiment.

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Maša Kolanović is a prize-winning author & professor best known for her genre-bending works of fiction & poetry. Her books include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the Lonely, 2001), the novel Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), & the short story collection Poštovani kukci i druge jezive price (Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories, 2019). The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, & the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb.

Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer & co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective & journal. Her work has appeared in the Periodical of the Modern Language Association, Words Without Borders, etc.