Aleksandar Hemon

A staggering work of beauty and brutality - Douglas StuartAs the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. Its not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but its nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies cant put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat.

Josh Levin es un aprendiz de guionista treintañero que se gana la vida dando clases de inglés para extranjeros mientras sueña con vender una de sus historias a una gran productora de Hollywood. Su portatil esta lleno de ideas para guiones, pero la unica que le importa de verdad es una que ha titulado La guerra de los zombis. Cuando un dia llega a su apartamento y se encuentra al casero -un veterano de la guerra del Golfo un poco tarado- hurgando en su colada, decide que ha llegado el momento de mudarse con su novia, la adorable Kimiko. Todo parece ir razonablemente bien hasta que Josh va a una fiesta en casa de Ana, una estudiante bosnia con un marido violento y celoso...Ambientada en unos Estados Unidos todavia traumatizados por los atentados del 11-s, Como se hizo La guerra de los zombis es una hilarante novela sobre un tipo que esta convencido de que uno se puede organizar bien la vida sobre la base de la ausencia absoluta de esperanza y ambicion. Un libro aparentemente muy distinto a los anteriores de su autor, pero que ha confirmado a Aleksandar Hemon como uno de los escritores mas interesantes del panorama literario internacional.Aleksandar Hemon ha conseguido con cinco libros compartir balda y renglon con Nabokov, Jonathan Franzen y David Foster Wallace. El PaisComo en las mejores comedias, es imposible no sentir la melancolia que subyace en lo absurdo. El ingenio de Hemon permite que lo emocional no parezca sensiblero. Francine Prose (The New York Review of Books)

The author of The Lazarus Project journeys with life's vagabonds in an electrifying new collection of stories Set in the darkest heart of Africa, in the backwaters of Slovenia, in the melting pot of Chicago, this brilliant collection of stories is coloured throughout by the 1992 Bosnian war. All but one of them features 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. As ever, Hemon confronts pain and anonymity without blanching but also finds delicious absurdity in experience. His is the great humanity of a writer who sees life on the margins, and gives voice to what he finds in a style that is breathtakingly his own.

El proyecto Lázaro cuenta la historia de Vladimir Brik, un escritor de origen bosnio que está obsesionado con un crimen cometido en 1908 cuando el joven yugoslavo Lazarus Averbuch fue asesinado por George Shippy, jefe de la policia de Chicago, en la puerta de la casa del oficial. En su investigacion para rastrear los pasos de Averbuch, Vladimir Brik recibe la ayuda del fotografo Ahmed Rora de origen musulman. Durante la reconstruccion de la historia del judio, Brik y Rora recorreran los escenarios de los linchamientos antisemiticos en la zona de Chisinau, las trazas de pobreza y corrupcion dejadas por una guerra no tan lejana y el paisaje desolado de una tierra olvidada incluso por sus propios ciudadanos.

On March 2, 1908, 19-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to Chicago, knocked on the front door of the house of George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police, for reasons lost to history. When Shippy came to the door, Averbuch offered him what he said was an important letter for him. But instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him.

The unprovoked murder of a Russian Jewish immigrant ignites a dazzling novel of flight, emigration and the meaning of home

A new book of linked stories by the author of the National Book Award finalist "The Lazarus Project."Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation- and his MacArthur "genius grant"-for his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked stories that stands with "The Lazarus Project" as the best work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have never been published before; the others have appeared in "The New Yorker," and several of those have also been included in "The Best American Short Stories." All are infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and illustrious voices of our time.What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the narrator, a young man who-like Hemon himself-was raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of "Love and Obstacles" are about that coming of age and the complications-the obstacles-of growing up in a Communist but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in young adulthood. But because it's Aleksandar Hemon, the stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely, as cohesive and powerful as any fiction- achingly human, charming, and inviting.

Un joven de Sarajevo viaja a Estados Unidos dejando atrás una ciudad en guerra. Antes de partir promete a su gran amiga de infancia escribir un diario en el que recogerá sus sensaciones y experiencias. En su travesía asiste a la transformación de su propia identidad, y vive impresionantes aventuras cuyas circunstancias únicas nos involucran a todos. Años después, de nuevo ya en Sarajevo, conoce a un escritor estadounidense a quien acompaña una enigmática mujer, una figura que hará eco en su memoria, que para entonces parece haber desdibujado el recuerdo de una promesa.

«“¿Qué es usted” No soy más que una red de preguntas sin respuesta, una constelación de otros. Me gustaría decir que tal vez sea demasiado pronto para decirlo.» La vida de Aleksandar Hemon empieza en

The life of a man named Jozef Pronek is recounted in this novel by a Bosnian-American writer. Pronek's life is traced from its beginnings to a time in the late 20th century when he is being interviewed for a job in Chicago as an ESL teacher. In between, he becomes increasingly alienated--"a real nowhere man"--in spite of a happy marriage and an eventful life.

Jozef Pronek, un joven crítico de rock, lleva en Chicago una vida de nómada al borde de la nada, recorriendo el circuito de los trabajos basura ofrecidos a los inmigrantes. Hemon nos desliza por el tobogan del tiempo a la adolescencia de Jozef en el Sarajevo de los años setenta, donde tenia una banda de rock; nos lleva a Kiev, donde habia ido a visitar a su abuelo, y conocio a George Bush (padre); asistimos a sus hilarantes, gozosos, primeros encuentros con el sexo; a su humillante experiencia como soldado; a su vida cuando aun podia ser un hombre de algun lugar. Pero ¿quien es realmente Jozef Pronek, ahora, en los años noventa? ¿Por que ambiguos narradores construyen a Pronek a la manera de un cuadro cubista de multiples facetas?

Una colección de relatos autobiográficos enlazados con la misma historia del mundo. La primera obra de Aleksandar Hemon. Aleksandar Hemon estaba de visita en los Estados Unidos cuando comenzó el sitio de Sarajevo, en 1992. Aunque muy joven, ya habia publicado en su pais, pero decidio quedarse en America y, mientras desempeñaba los mas variados oficios, aprendia ingles con la Lolita de Nabokov y se imponia un plazo de cinco años para ser un escritor en su nueva lengua. Los ocho relatos que componen La cuestion de Bruno, perturbadora mezcla de realidad y ficcion, de memoria y descubrimiento, de humor y de horror, son su entrada en esa gran literatura de escritores que han huido de su idioma para reencontrarse a si mismos con excepcional fulgor en una lengua de adopcion. Mas que una coleccion de cuentos autonomos, esta es una sutil construccion donde los relatos se reenvian unos a otros, encierran relatos subordinados que les otorgan nuevo sentido, espesor, significacion. Asi, la historia de la familia Hemon se enlaza con la historia del mundo, con aquel soldado breton que se alisto en el ejercito de Napoleon y acabo en Ucrania, se caso con una joven del lugar que le salvo la vida, cambio su apellido a Hemun, y perdio la memoria de sus origenes y de su deambular por el mundo, o el acordeonista, tatarabuelo del escritor, cuya musica oye el archiduque Franz Ferdinand poco antes de que lo asesinen. Y leemos, conteniendo el aliento, el relato del niño que espia a su padre a quien cree un espia, en los dias de la Yugoslavia de Tito, paralelo a la historia del mitico Victor Sorge, un espia de verdad; estan tambien las cartas, que posiblemente nunca llegaron a destino, de Aida, la joven musulmana de Sarajevo, que corta los peores trozos de las peliculas que filma su amante -el verdadero horror no puede ser puesto en imagenes, ni en palabras- y las guarda en un video que llama Cinema interno. Y exploramos el territorio alienigena, no ya de la guerra, sino del absoluto desarraigo y enajenacion que descubre y nos descubre el joven Josef Pronek, alter ego del propio Hemon, a quien la guerra de los Balcanes y el sitio de Sarajevo sorprenden en los Estados Unidos...

UN MONDE DE CIEL ET DE TERRE (GRAND PRIX DE LITTÉR

This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemons masterpiece' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud AtlasThe World and All That It Holds is the epic, cross-continental tale of a love so strong it conquers the Great War, revolution, and even death itself.As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. Its not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but its nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies cant put in perspective.

Two magnificent memoirs by Aleksandar Hemon, presented together in a glorious single edition: together they make a major work from one of our major writers.In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents immigration to Canada of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo, and the new lives his parents were forced to build. He portrays both the perfect, intimate details of his mothers lonely upbringing, his fathers fanatical beekeeping and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story of his family and of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians, and a few confused Canadians.This Does Not Belong to You is the exhilarating, freewheeling, unabashedly personal companion to My Parents. It shows Hemon at his most dazzling and untempered in a series of beautifully distilled memories and observations about his family, friends and childhood in Sarajevo, presented as explosive, hilarious, poignant miniatures.Not only is Hemons book a masterpiece in literary terms, it is also a repudiation of the idea of the immigrant as a singular and infantilized creature, a human of lesser depth and complexity than everyone else Rafia Zakaria, TLS

For Aleksandar Hemon, football is more than a sport. It certainly is not exercise. It is the beautiful game and never more so than in The Matters of Life, Death, and More. From the celebrated author of The World and All That It Holds.In this volume, Hemon revists memories of his first World Cup in 1974, for which his homeland Yugoslavia qualified in dramatic fashion. He takes us through the World Cups of the eighties, nineties and noughties, up to the brink of 2014: the first time Bosnia and Herzegovina had qualified in the countrys history.Here too are stories of heated games played in childhood, as Hemon recounts his youth on Sarajevos gravel courtyards, the frozen pick-up games of his adulthood in Chicago, and the (slightly less intense) soccer practices of his daughter, replete with cones and shin guards.As Hemon notes, an average life seldom contains more than twenty World Cups our games are tragically numbered. In The Matters of Life, Death, and More, he pays due attention to the joy, skill, agony, triumph and the beauty of everything that football is. And football is, of course, everything.

Some of the richest delights in contemporary fiction, as well as some of the best jokes GuardianFrom the prize-winning author of The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon, Love and Obstacles is a stunningly original collection of short fiction.The explosive perils of adolescence, a country falling apart, the overwhelming vertigo of striking out abroad: this is life in which love is only one of many obstacles.From Sarajevo to the darkest heart of Africa, deepest Slovenia, and the melting pot of Chicago, this brilliant and restlessly inventive collection is shot through with humour and truth found in the most surprising of places.Infinitely vibrant and alive Financial Times

His language sings . . . I should not be surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point Giles Foden, author of The Last King of ScotlandThrough shifting narration and beautifully original prose, Nowhere Man sees Aleksandar Hemon return to the story of Jozef Pronek through childhood, political upheaval and new life as an immigrant.In Aleksandar Hemons electrifying first story collection, The Question of Bruno, Jozef Pronek left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, he began to make his way in a foreign land and his adventures were unforgettable.Now Pronek, the accidental nomad, gets his own book. Through a series of vignettes and across the great expanse of life, Nowhere Man startles us into yet more exhilarating ways of seeing the world anew.Sheer exuberance, generosity and engagement with life Sunday Times

Prose this powerful could wake the dead ObserverCrossing a century of Eastern European history, The Lazarus Project is a profound exploration of alienation and the immigrant experience from Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds.On 2 March 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the citys Chief of Police. He was shot dead.After the shooting, it was claimed he was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city seething with tension.A century later, two friends become obsessed with the truth about Lazarus and decide to travel to his birthplace. As the stories intertwine, a world emerges in which everything and nothing has changed . . .This is easily Hemons best work to date, an intricately tessellated portrait of flight, emigration, and the meaning of home Evening Standard