A major literary voice in Europe, Ugresic brings deep personal insight into the grinding despair and destructive nationalism of post-communist societies, often writing with lively, ironic flair keenly translated by Elias-Bursac. Do Lenin’s mummy, Adele and Croatian unemployment have any business being in the same essay together? In this book, yes. Gladly.

Ugrešić is most fundamentally an observer, able to reveal the cracks and fissures in our thinking, organizations, and structures, often rearranging their pieces and putting them back together in a way that reveals something foreign—ugly or unexpectedly beautiful (sometimes both), a phenomenon we may have failed to notice. She continues her trademark fastidious and fascinating commentary.

Dubravka Ugrešić’s newest collection of essays, The Age of Skin (translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać), opens with fire.

Ugrešić's pieces are in her familiar style, wending through various anecdotes, personal reminiscences, and observations -- rarely in great detail, but getting to the heart of matters, and often circling back to an example or person in the same piece. Although much she discusses includes the outrageous, her tone and presentation remain controlled -- not dispassionately neutral (her position is usually perfectly clear) but anything but screaming with the frustration one can well imagine many of these things eliciting. Her sense of humor -- often near-deadpan --, and the many far-flung examples -- including literary and other cultural ones -- also contribute to making for consistently engaging essays.

[Ugrešić's] title is operative. If Despentes’s and Russell’s books are concerned with bodies rising out of the vicious requirements of the binary, Ugrešić is concerned with the skins such bodies, and their body politic, wear ...The fierceness of her critique resides in such literary understatement.