*Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah* begins from a point of listening - turning up the radio, dragging a café chair closer to the man with the saz, dropping a record needle. In the Sarajevo of Miljenko Jergović's childhood, folk songs permeated life. Their dusky melodies filled car rides, scored television programs, and echoed down alleyways as daybreak glazed the city's steeples and minarets. In these nineteen stories, Jergović imagines what might have inspired such wistful tunes, crafting a catalog of source material. Relics of an old world arise. Time slows to an ancient cadence. Fate, misfortune, hubris, and luck transform individuals into a collective cry. Like an accordion that unfolds to fill a room with sound, the book expands and compresses - by turns bawdy, brutal, funny, and wise. Drawn from deep wells of folklore, Jergović weaves together an extraordinary ethnography that manages to both critique the imperial domination and strife that has marked the Balkan region for centuries, and to display, carefully and tenderly, the lives of individuals, be they Christian or Muslim. Lives that seem to never end, in that boundless space of myth.