Fables From a Mouse, a Parrot, A Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, and a Raven

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ

“This is yet another brilliant volume from Slavenka Drakulić. Her mastery of the Balkan scene is well known to American readers. This time she offers nuanced, differentiated portraits of “real socialism” all over Eastern Europe. A masterpiece.”
—Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM is a biting and brilliant critique of communism narrated by an array of unlikely characters: a mouse in Prague, a parrot from the former Yugoslavia, a Bulgarian bear, a cat in Warsaw, a mole from East Germany, a Hungarian pig, a dog in Bucharest, and an Albanian raven. Told in the first person, these astute animals offer the readers their own stories of life under the former communist regimes and what came after their demise. These sharp-witted observers wonder—in their own particular ways—whether democracy and capitalism were a change for the better and ask big questions: has the idea of social justice been lost forever? What are we to do with our past?

In A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, and a Raven (Penguin Paperback Original / On-Sale: February 22, 2011 / ISBN: 978-0-143-11863-3 / 208pages / $14.00), Slavenka Drakulić, who The Washington Post calls “a perceptive and amusing social critic,” takes readers on a journey through eight former Eastern Bloc countries, twenty years after the fall of the Communism.