Dictators, Tractors and Other Adventures

The literary-journalistic reports collected here cover a variety of topics and places: a group of snowboarders trying to overcome the traumas of the past in Bosnia; a theatre director with a dictatorial bent in occupied Crimea; life in a nature reserve in war-time Ukraine; a trip along the Danube with a team of photojournalists; a tractor chase in Belarus with a farcically tragic ending; on the trail of a serial killer in Macedonia; following (two) war criminals in Serbia; wandering through the little-known Roma communities of Bulgaria; the coexistence of a provincial town in Kosovo and the largest American military base in the Balkans; the struggle of a village in Romania against a gold mining company; the fight of environmental activists around the world against shale gas extraction. What unites these seemingly so disparate texts is the idea that they all happened outside the room, outside, where, in the words of Mark Twain, "truth is stranger than fiction."