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.”
Dimiter Kenarov is a distinguished literary journalist whose tenacious reporting and crystalline prose renders vividly the conflicts in the Balkans as well as the daily life of this vital and largely overlooked region. His collection, Dictators, Tractors and Other Adventures, is a gripping and essential book. Mark Danner, author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War
Dimiter Kenarov is a most excellent writer, and I toast him with my most recent gin martini. Gay Talese, author of The Kingdom and the Power and Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
From the death of Slobodan Milošević, with all the kitsch of the ensuing mourning, through Radovan Karadžić’s pancake as a local attraction, to the Ukrainian Serengeti on the border with Crimea, to the strange case of the Belarusian tractors and the arrest of the author himself... Dimiter Kenarov has traversed every kilometer of these stories and has felt every word on his own skin. A powerful and absolutely timely book. Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter, International Booker Prize winner
In these engaging reportage narratives, the world is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Dimiter Kenarov has the ability to listen without judging, to be at home among strangers, to weave seemingly disparate threads into a skillful fusion, and to draw from lived experience at almost any cost. Kapka Kassabova, author of Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
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