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...

"After winning her local tennis club tournament, Scarlett Thomas, 41-year-old novelist, decided to dedicate a year of her life to tennis. At 12, Scarlett discovered her father was not the punk photographer who'd brought her up, but was in fact the man she previously knew as her godfather. At 14, she was sent to Mexico to connect with her terrifying grandmother. She was sent to a conservative boarding school in the middle of nowhere, her only link...