BELGRADE NOIR

Fourteen tales of woe from what Serbian novelist Momo Kapor once called “a low-budget New York.”

Like all Balkan capitals, Belgrade cowers in the shadow of war. In Muharem Bazdulj’s “Black Widow, White Russian,” a Serbian woman who grew up in Sweden enlists the help of a recent divorcé to find the soldier responsible for her father’s death. A Croatian who’s secretly a Serb comes to no good in Miljenko Jergović’s “The Case of Clerk Hinko, a Noose, and Luminal.” The gay heroine of Vladimir Arsenijević’s “Regarding the Father” helps her lover avenge the rape of her mother by war criminals. Vule Žurić shows Partisan and Soviet soldiers sharing the task of excavating the grave of a spy killed by the Nazis in “The Man Who Wasn’t Mars.” Aleksandar Gatalica allows another victim of Nazi brutality to take his revenge via time travel in “The Phantom of the National Theater.” Other stories look forward rather than back in time. The spyware that the IT specialist in Misha Glenny’s “The RAT” installs on a customer’s iPhone thwarts a murder. Goran Skrobonja explores the consequences of a technology that allows people to create a living doppelgänger to take their place when they want to be somewhere else in “Alter Ego Inc.” And some stories are timeless in showing the strange turns that can be taken by the most pedestrian among us, like the chess-playing retirees who discover a sadomasochistic sex business operating out of the cardiologist’s office on the fourth floor of their apartment building in Oto Oltvanji’s “Underneath It All Runs the River of Sadness.”

Ivanović’s contributions are from Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Finnish writers—all admirably noirish.