Josip Novakovich's Vignettes offers a wide-ranging look at his life, including his youth in hometown Daruvar, Croatia, where he attended school in a castle on a hill with barrels of whites and reds stored in the basement, "my peers and I learned the basics of math, grammar, history, and literature, somewhat dizzy and fumigated in wine vapors that seeped upward through the oiled oak floors."? Over the course of seventeen short stories, Novakovich traces his relationship with wine: "Wine may have a lot to do with my interest in literature, or it may be the other way around-I am not sure which came first, those vapors, or the stories involving wine? And so, a bit of wine, in a small glass, a bit of truth, in a few lines."?