12 books like In Elvis's Room

This book about Yugoslavia is my favourite work of travel writing, all the more remarkable for being written during the Blitz, amid the sound of bombs raining over London.

It is half-a-million words long and it deals with a country that doesn’t exist anymore – but don’t let that put you off. Historians and critics have called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon the greatest travel book of the twentieth century and I agree.

Rebecca West discovered Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War because – in the growing certainty of the apocalypse which was facing Europe – she wanted to write about a small country and its relationship with great empires.

Yugoslavia seemed at first an almost accidental choice but it changed her life. 

This book was written by one of the most interesting figures in the history of communist Yugoslavia, Milovan Đilas. He had been a high-level official and a close collaborator of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslav partisans (who would become marshal and president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), before he became best known Yugoslav dissident. 

In this book Đilas gives a first-hand testimony of his meetings with Joseph Stalin, as a member of Yugoslav delegations sent to Moscow. Beautifully written, the book provides a rich insight into the political situation in the Balkans and in Stalin’s Soviet Union during some of the most turbulent times of modern European history. In a unique way, Đilas manages to combine personal accounts with critical perspectives on ideologies and political events that were in many ways decisive for Yugoslavia in the period to come.

The book challenges the well-established and dominant narratives about the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s that have been promoted both in the mainstream media and in academic publications over the past decades. Written by a pre-eminent contemporary American political philosopher, Michael Parenti, the book in many ways compliments Noam Chomsky’s perspectives on the region and the broader imperial policies toward it.  

I am Slovene-American, my mother being off the boat. This book told me what I’d wanted to know: how my people engaged with the world around them, not just physically, but metaphysically. Anyone interested in understanding the way folk belief mixed with medicine, and why people would resort to beliefs we would view strange in modern day, could learn quite a bit from this book about the rural folk of Slovenia and their medicine.

It’s also a key resource for one fantasy book I still have in the works, which is reminiscent of Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, and it is a wonderful anthropological resource that shows, very plainly, how magic is alive in this world as much as it is in the fictional ones we love so much.

The sources found in Collective Identities illustrate how national ideas were received, fashioned, and conveyed by thinkers in many parts of Europe during the modern era. Each volume also includes a number of opening essays and chapter introductions which provide helpful references to additional foundational texts and matters of historical context. In sum, the volumes perform the very valuable service of introducing readers to some common elements in many ‘discourses’ from the period as well as important local variations in style and content.

Although the book was originally published in 1983, it still remains a very valuable source for understanding one of the major socio-economic phenomena in post-WWII Yugoslavia—Yugoslav self-managing (or self-governing) socialism. The author offers a detailed insight into the theory upon which this system was based, as well as how this system worked in practice, pointing to many obstacles that could be detected. Given the importance of self-management in the history of socialist and anarchist thought, this book remains indispensable for the study of this Yugoslav experiment.

This is an extraordinary book that gives a broad understanding of the Balkan region in its cultural and historical contexts. The book explores the concept of the Balkans and its changing meaning which far surpasses its geographical connotations, becoming some kind of a concept-container capable of containing all sorts of fantasies and political aspirations. The book does an excellent job of depicting how various imperialisms managed to determine, to a very significant extent, the fate of peoples in the Balkans, while creating a certain image of the region whose significance extends far beyond its physical boundaries.

I am a sucker for war-time love stories, and the tragedy of this one is it is true. An exceptional piece of writing about courage and love, set in the middle of the most heinous, horrific events of modern history. A simple, crumpled note passed between strangers through a barbed wire fence begins weaving a true tale, a love story rivaling that of Romeo and Juliet.

I love this book. One of my favorite movies is The Great Escape (yes, I know it was also a book) and reading this book feels like watching this movie. The story is a simliar one that is an OSS rescue mission to save 500 downed airmen stuck in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, while they secretly build an entire airstrip large enough for C-47s (if you’re not familiar, they are very large airplanes). Avoiding the Germans in the cover of darkness, the airmen and villagers risked their lives to build this strip in attempt of rescue. Oh, and there’s also a revolution happening at the same time in Yugoslavia. This horribly dangerous mission makes for an incredible reading experience.

Well, there’s an obvious reason, I was born in Travnik, a small town in the very heart of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Despite being a small place, it is immensely important—especially if you ask people who were born and raised there ☺  

This book is a novel by one of the greatest European writers of the mid-twentieth century, Ivo Andrić, and it is one (of two) of his best novels. Apart from being written in a beautiful and unique (“Andrić’s”) style, it is also one of the best resources for understanding the cultural, social, and religious dynamic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, not only during the Ottoman times. If one wishes to get an insight into the culture and “mentality” of the people who traditionally inhabited the region, Chronicles of Travnik (often, curiously enough, translated into English as Bosnian Chronicle) can serve better than most sociological studies. It’s better, of course,… show more.