Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, "Nadirs" is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Muller's childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child's often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state. Herta Muller has been one of the most prolific and acclaimed German-language writers of the last two decades. Born in 1953 in the Banat, a German-language region of Romania, she emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 and currently lives in Berlin. She has received numerous literary awards, including the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sieglinde Lug is a professor emerita of German and comparative literature at the University of Denver