Search results for ""Author Aleksandar Hemon""

‘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 Hemon’s 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

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From the author of The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon's The Book of My Lives is an unforgettable memoir of a life forever marked by international conflict.Aleksandar Hemon grew up in a blissful Sarajevo, where his childhood was consumed by football, his adolescence by friends, movies and girls and where, as a young man, he poked at the pretensions of his beloved city with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism.And then, at twenty-seven, Hemon flew to Chicago for a month-long visit. A matter of weeks later Sarajevo was engulfed in an atrocious war. Hemon found himself an exile. He wouldn’t return home for five years and, when he did, he found his city irrevocably changed.‘If you’ve never read Aleksandar Hemon, prepare to have your worldview deepened’ – Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur Genius Award-winner Hemon, the Best European Fiction series offers a window into what's happening in literary scenes throughout Europe.

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The Making of Zombie Wars is a hilarious black comedy from Aleksandar Hemon, celebrated author of The Lazarus Project.Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancée of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her.Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching English as a Second Language classes in Chicago. His laptop is full of ideas, but the only one to really take root is Zombie Wars. When Josh comes home to discover his landlord, an unhinged army vet, rifling through his dirty laundry, he decides to move in with his girlfriend, Kimmy.Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi-hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid.It's domestic bliss – for a moment. But Josh becomes entangled with a student, a Bosnian woman named Ana, whose husband is jealous and violent.Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow.Disaster ensues and, as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, Aleksandar Hemon's The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence.‘The Making of Zombie Wars is crazy in the best sense of the word, and very few authors could have pulled it off’ – NPR

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'This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud AtlasThe 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. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can’t put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto’s protector and lover.Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman that will truly survive.

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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 mother’s lonely upbringing, his father’s 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 Hemon's 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

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The World and All That It Holdsin all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical gloryshowcases Aleksandar Hemon's celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.As 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 estimable father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a ma

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Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Making of Zombie Wars; The Book of My Lives, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller; and three books of short stories, including Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Genius' grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

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'This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s 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. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can’t put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto’s protector and lover.Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman that will truly survive.

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From the author of The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon's stunning debut The Question of Bruno is a collection of beautifully told yet polically-charged short fiction.In this elegy for the vanished Yugoslavia, Hemon's stories journey through the intertwined history of a family and a nation, writing in prose of unparalleled daring, invention and wit.This collection features the novella Blind Jozef & Dead Souls, as a young immigrant to the United States watches while his homeland of Sarajevo falls to a violent siege.‘Like Nabokov, Hemon writes with the startling peeled vision of the outsider, weighing words as if for the first time; he shares with Kundera an ability to find grace and humour in the bleakest of circumstances’ – Observer

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‘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

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2013 may be the best year yet for Best European Fiction. The inimitable John Banville joins the list of distinguished preface writers for Aleksandar Hemon's series, and A. S. Byatt represents England among a luminous cast of European contributors. Fans of the series will find everything they've grown to love, while new readers will discover what they've been missing!

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Best European Fiction is an exhilarating read. Time

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The launch of Dalkey's Best European Fiction series was nothing short of phenomenal, with wide-ranging coverage in international media such as Time magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, and the Guardian; glowing reviews and interviews in print and online magazines such as the Believer, Bookslut, Paste, and the Huffington Post; radio interviews with editor Aleksandar Hemon on NPR stations in the US and BBC Radio 3 and 4 in the UK; and a terrific response from booksellers, who made Best European Fiction 2010 an "Indie Next" pick and created table displays and special promotions throughout the US and UK. For 2011, Aleksandar Hemon is back as editor, along with a new preface by Colum McCann, and with a whole new cast of authors and stories, including work from countries not included in Best European Fiction 2010.

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"Let us not mince words here: Danilo Kis's Garden, Ashes is an unmitigated masterpiece, surely not just one of the best books about the Holocaust, but one of the greatest books of the past century." Aleksandar Hemon, from the introduction

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"Psalm 44" is the last major work of fiction by Danilo Kiš to be translated into English, and his only novel dealing explicitly with Auschwitz (where his own father died). Written when he was only twenty-five, before embarking on the masterpieces that would make him an integral figure in twentieth-century letters, Psalm 44 shows Kiš at his most lyrical and unguarded, demonstrating that even in "the place of dragons... covered with the shadow of death," there can still be poetry. Featuring characters based on actual inmates and warders--including the abominable Dr. Mengele--"Psalm 44" is a baring of many of the themes, patterns, and preoccupations Kiš would return to in future, albeit never with the same starkness or immediacy.

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