Under Pressure

With this collection of brutal and heart-wrenching stories, the Bosnian writer Faruk Sehic secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region. A war veteran and a poet, Sehic combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader; Sehic literally describes the war through the gun sight of an AK-47. His book is brutal, naturalistic, honest and uncompromising; his characters kill and get killed, they rob corpses and homes, they get drunk and get into fights, they parade in front of a mirror wearing a uniform ripped off a dead soldier. There's drugs and alcohol in abundance, and they are--paradoxically--reason's last line of defense.