Дубравка Угрешич: The Ministry of Pain

Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&amp,M clothing at a sweatshop they call the «Ministry.» Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their «Yugonostalgia» in essays about their personal experiences during their homeland s cultural and physical disintegration. But Tanja s act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class — and pulls her dangerously close to another — which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.