I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.
Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.
