As the frequency of air-raid sirens sending an apartment building’s residents to the basement increases, children block out reality with the toys at hand—some imported from Western Europe and North America, others regional knockoffs or questionable improvisations. Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news and the intrigues of sexual curiosity. The idealised glamour of Barbie and Ken on an endless perfect honeymoon morphs into make-believe scenarios that reflect the splintering social structure brought about by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s: politicians campaigning to define what it means to be a “real” Croatian, a refugee ball with “disgusting” dolls lesser than “genuine” Barbie products, the discovery of a mass grave filled with the headless corpses thought to be Ken’s mistresses. Underground Barbie was translated by Ena Selimović.

Maša Kolanović is a prize-winning author and professor best known for her genre-bending works of fiction and poetry. Her books include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the Lonely, 2001), the novel Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), and the short story collection Poštovani kukci i druge jezive price (Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories, 2019). The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb.