The Ministry of Pain

Far from home, a fractured community of Yugoslav outcasts struggle with their lives in award–winning author Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel The Ministry of Pain.

Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the “Ministry.”

Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their “Yugonostalgia” in essays about their personal experiences during their homeland’s cultural and physical disintegration. But Tanja’s act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class—and pulls her dangerously close to another—which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.

“A shiningly weird and powerful novel. . . . [It] approaches perfection.” —Washington Post

“Soulful, often searing. . . . This is a work that comes from the gut, one that deserves to be read.” —New York Times Book Review

“Splendidly ambitious. . . . She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.” —Susan Sontag