Death in the Museum of Modern Art ― Six Stories

Avoiding the easy traps of politics and blame, Lazarevska reveals a world full of incidents and worries so similar to our own, and yet always under the shadow of the snipers and the bombs that we know are out there and that occasionally impinge on the story in shocking ways. One of the finest works to have emerged from the tragedy that was the siege of Sarajevo, Death in the Museum of Modern Art received the "Best Book" award from the Society of Writers of Bosnia & Herzegovina upon its publication, and Lazarevska is considered by many to be the undiscovered genius of contemporary Bosnian literature.

Alma Lazarevska is a Bosnian prose writer. She is a graduate of the University of Sarajevo, a city which is the subject of her collection of essays, Sarajevo Solitaire, and is an important character in her novel The Sign of the Rose, inspired by the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. The lead story from Lazarevska’s second collection, Plants are Something Else, was selected for the special Balkan edition of Wasafiri literary magazine. Celia Hawkesworth is an award winning translator and Slavic scholar. Among her many translations are The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, short-listed for the Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation, and The Culture of Lies, winner of the 1999 Heldt Prize for Translation.