With this collection of brutal and heart-wrenching stories, the Bosnian writer Faruk Šehic secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region. A war veteran and a poet, Sehic combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader; Šehic literally describes the war through the gun sight of an AK-47. His book is brutal, naturalistic, honest and uncompromising; his characters kill and get killed, they rob corpses and homes, they get drunk and get into fights, they parade in front of a mirror wearing a uniform ripped off a dead soldier. There’s drugs and alcohol in abundance, and they are—paradoxically—reason’s last line of
Literary critics have hailed Faruk Šehic as the leader of the "mangled generation" of writers born in 1970s Yugoslavia, and his books have achieved cult status with readers across the whole region. Under Pressure was awarded the Zoro Verlag Prize.
His debut novel Quiet Flows the Una received the Meša Selimovic prize for the best novel published in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia in 2011 and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. Šehic lives in Sarajevo and works as a columnist and journalist.
Mirza Puric is a literary translator working from German and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian. He is a contributing editor of EuropeNow and in-house translator for the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop. From 2014 to 2017 he was an editor-at-large for Asymptote.
