The Wall In My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain (Words Without Borders Anthologies) - Softcover

"Readers will experience their optimism, hopes, dreams, and disappointment with the communist society as it was implemented in Easter Europe, as well as the joy and confusion following the collapse of the curtain. Students, along with general readers who enjoy genres from memoir to 20th-century global culture and world history, should consider this volume."--Library Journal

"The Wall in My Head isn't a meditation on the end of communism in the Soviet Bloc, but its history entire--its successes, its failures, and its absurdities. Though provoking, oddly nostalgic, and ultimately inconclusive, The Wall in My Head is a worthy investigation of a way of life which, for all its flaws, found a place in the hearts of millions."--Daniel K. Lakhdhir, The Harvard Crimson

"The editors have arranged these high-caliber works to create a tension between celebratory and somber writing, and that gives the book a touch of greatness. From one chapter to the next you never know when in time or where on the map you'll land next."--Matt Jakubowski, The Brooklyn Rail

"The Wall in My Head succeeds because it doesn't feel like a reenactment or a rehashing or a celebration or even a condemnation. What it does feel like is intelligent people grappling with difficult questions in very human ways that are often funny or sad or both."--Amanda DeMarco, The Front Table

"All these pieces--stories, novel excerpts, poems, essays, memoirs--have appeared before (with the exception of a fine introduction by Keith Gessen), but it is good to have them in one volume, both for purposes of comparison and also because each is so short and potent that when one is finished another becomes immediately necessary."--Joshua Cohen, Tablet

"Somehow in the mere 231 pages of this book, the editors have successfully given an overview of the reactions to the fall of the Wall inside these countries and abroad, and from nearly every sector of society from politicians to pop culture icons to literary figures."--Okla Elliott, Inside Higher Ed

"From the Yugoslav standpoint, the Cold War was like a football match in which the team you would usually root for is not playing; at the beginning you are neutral (or, like us, "non-aligned"), but over the course of the match you take joy in the good moves of a player from one or the other team, and your sympathies typically lie with whatever side is currently the underdog."--Muharem Badulj, from "The Noble School"

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Words without Borders presentsThe Wall in My Head, an exciting anthology that features fiction, essays, images, and original documents to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to present day.