At a remove from Sarajevo, on a writerâ s residency in France, a playwright finds himself in the thrall of echoes from the past â in a labyrinth of siege-time references.

This is not an ordinary memoir, but an exploration of traumatic experience as revealed by remnants of association. It is also a mapping of otherness from the standpoint of the stranger, of near affinities that end in divergence, color as a point of contrast, of animosity like a bolt from the blue.

The work of a master playwright from the Balkans, Goran Stefanovski, is anthologized here. A charged family drama, Wild Flesh, opens the collection, plotting the ideological rifts and baleful foreign intrusions that gripped Yugoslavia in the advent of World War ll. The False Bottom follows as a work of pure subversion. In three movements set in disparate years, 1911, 1983, and 1999, a single character unsettles the powers that be, quakes the very ground â the fake premises â of the dominant order and frees the forces of life. Tattooed Souls is set in America, played out in an emigree community. Though embroiled in a new world, they bear the telling imprints of the old. Casabalkan (after Casablanca) is a gambling boat afloat in neutral waters wherein every party to the war can interact freely, a microcosm in which every element can intermingle. In the short Ex-Yu, a daughter is in pursuit of her fatherâ s final moments. Grilling two witnesses, she attempts an orphic journey to the scene of a suicide en route to battle. These plays speak bluntly to the human condition. Though set in the recent past, they track with the pressing concerns of our time and balance on the same precarity.