Basements and Other Museums

With the precision of a surgeon and a poet s reverberant intelligence, Vedran Husic gives us stories of children growing up in war-ravaged Bosnia, a world of vanishing fathers, games invented around an alley sniper s bullets and the bittersweet aspirations of adolescent Bosnian immigrants and refugees in America. In taut yet voluptuous prose, with philosophic ferocity, Basements and Other Museums marks the debut of a crucial new voice in contemporary fiction.-Melissa Pritchard