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“... and Star Turn, though unlike in most other respects, share a preoccupation with the Holocaust. Danilo Kis’s novel is a lament for the passing of the Central European petty bourgeoisie. In one scene a Jewish shopkeeper, a man who has been as comfortably entrenched in domestic life as any of Dickens’s small bourgeois, watches his household goods ...”

“... these tricks and devices, Hemon revealed himself an admirer, or disciple, of the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš, who had a taste, as Susan Sontag put it, for ‘odd mixtures’. Kiš drew on Gnosticism, Islam and Balkan poetry, while disdaining philosophies he saw as enslaved to an overarching concept: nationalism, monotheism, even realism. The omniscient ...”

“... he didn’t escape censure). The same stratagems were used by Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia and Danilo Kis in Yugoslavia. Ugrešić has been circling this territory for a while. In her new book, the tradition of upside-down, modernist myth-making or ironical fable has freed her tongue. Skittish at times, affectionately comic, and lavish with improbable ...”

“... ustashe in 1941, he was saved by none other than Mile Budak. Later, Tito took him under his wing. Danilo Kis called him a ‘Communist Voltaire’. Tudjman recently intervened to stop the budget being axed for a Krleza encyclopedia, long planned to coincide with the centenary of his birth in July. The boyish nouveau philosophe Alain Finkielkraut got a ...”

“... a writer defies the internal censor, the defiance is deforming. After quoting the Yugoslav writer, Danilo Kis’s remark that ‘it is impossible to win against this censor, for he is like God,’ Coetzee remarks: ‘the final proof that something has, so to speak, gone wrong with writers like ... Kis is the ...”

“... story in almost any version. A simpler case of coming home or staying home in translation would be Danilo Kiš’s story of a man spooked by his own shoes as they sit on the floor of his darkened room. All versions end with a live rat arising from one of the shoes, thus justifying and rerouting the story’s weirdness, but doing it in unison. One could invert ...”

“... that separated his comrades from his enemies.This story, and others like it, are reminiscent of Danilo Kiš’s A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, which tracks a number of characters caught up in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and which, like Fernández’s book, is situated between fiction, essay and report. Yet whereas Kiš felt free to invent and ...”