A Muzzle for Witches

As with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresic''s final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is a conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragic, covering topics such as ''Women and the Male Perspective,'' ''The Culture of (Self)Harm,'' and ''The Melancholy of Vanishing.'' But the book is more than a simple interview: It''s a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil - especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic''s birth country - and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing. One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, whose novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.