Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, Love and Obstacles, The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man and The Book of My Lives. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Genius Award, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, and, most recently, a 2012 USA Fellowship. He lives in Chicago.
Praise for Love and Obstacles
A New York Times Notable Book
"You may feel nearly giddy with pleasure at how beautifully
written, funny, and entertaining [these stories] are, and at the
depths of tenderness and seriousness swirling beneath their wry,
deceptively offhand surface." -- Francine Prose, O, the Oprah
Magazine
"Marvelous and original... Hemon writes with a peculiar grace,
somehow both reckless and unflinching, both troublingly absurd and
absolutely precise." -- The Boston Globe
"The stories are scarred elegies, quickened with poetry, anger,
violence, wistful love, and, throughout, Hemon's extraordinary
lyric freedom." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Reviewers find it difficult to resist comparing Aleksandar Hemon
to Nabokov, since both men [have a] preternatural facility in their
second, acquired language." -- The Washington Post
Bosnian-born Hemon (The Lazarus Project) again beautifully twists the language in this collection of eight powerful and disquieting stories. The 1992 Bosnian war colors in the background of all the tales, whose settings range from Africa to Chicago and Sarajevo. Arranged chronologically, all but one feature a Hemon-like narrator named Bogdan, first met as a surly teenager during his diplomat father's assignment in Zaire, where he's happily corrupted by a degenerate American espionage agent. In each successive story, Bogdan recalls the surreal and salient experiences of his life: his youth with his ironically depicted family; his early determination to be a poet; his accidental sojourn in America, where he was caught after the commencement of hostilities in Bosnia; and his return to a "cesspool of insignificant, drizzly suffering," where he has a transformative night interviewing a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Hemon arranges words like gems in a necklace. A necktie is "stretched across the chair seat, like a severed tendon"; a car is "stickered with someone else's thought"; a character's teeth are "like organ pipes." Writing with steely control and an antic eye, Hemon has assembled another extraordinary work. (May) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Praise for Love and Obstacles
A New York Times Notable Book
"You may feel nearly giddy with pleasure at how beautifully
written, funny, and entertaining [these stories] are, and at the
depths of tenderness and seriousness swirling beneath their wry,
deceptively offhand surface." -- Francine Prose, O, the Oprah
Magazine
"Marvelous and original... Hemon writes with a peculiar grace,
somehow both reckless and unflinching, both troublingly absurd and
absolutely precise." -- The Boston Globe
"The stories are scarred elegies, quickened with poetry, anger,
violence, wistful love, and, throughout, Hemon's extraordinary
lyric freedom." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Reviewers find it difficult to resist comparing Aleksandar Hemon
to Nabokov, since both men [have a] preternatural facility in their
second, acquired language." -- The Washington Post
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
