A Head Full of Joy

Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. This collection of sixteen stories takes us on an eccentric tour of contemporary existence. A lonely man rants about everything under the sun, including the sun itself. A vampire recounts the history and travails of the Balkans' bloodsucking community. A grief-stricken widower leads his son on a frantic search through the night. A husband and his pregnant wife argue, in Raymond Carver-like fashion, over whether Carver's stories will have a negative influence on the baby. In prose rich with Nabokovian detail and barroom humor, Spahic paints a portrait of a world so strange, it could only exist in the twenty-first century.