Hemon does a great job in juxtaposing stories of immigrants to America, but "The Lazrus Project" is not about "Immigrants to America." While the novel does forward pointed observations and sometimes less than subtle criticisms of political and economic power structures, this is a story centred ar...
Sententious, odourless, one-dimensional writing seasoned with the writer's insufferable, bloated ego. Though eerily detached from the core of this book, every now and then, some interesting language choices keep one going from chapter to chapter.Instead of a novel, this reads like the diary of He...
I am reading a collection of stories, “Love and Obstacles” by Aleksandar Hemon, a very special writer. Hemon was born in Sarajevo in former Yugoslavia and was already a Bosnian writer when he found himself in the United States in 1992, just prior to the outbreak of war in Sarajevo, his beloved na...
This was a very interesting collection of short stories from around Europe. There's one piece from each country, so it really felt like a broad and varied collection rather than being weighted toward particular countries. One thing I didn't like is that some of them were extracts from longer piec...
I think this book is incredible – incredibly bad. Everybody loves this book, and this astounds me. I absolutely hate it. The writing is jumbled, full of nasty depictions and often indecipherable. It is a mixture of history, biography and fiction. (But my opinion changes by the time I reach the ...
Nowhere Man is published as a novel, yet the seven stories comprising it do not necessarily create the coherent whole we have grown accustomed to call “a novel.” But the book’s epigraph, a quote from The Age of Genius by Bruno Schulz, might give us a clue to the novel’s structure and inner logic...
With Davor and Pedja, two friends who also got jobs with the magazine, I rented a three-bedroom apartment in the old neighborhood Kovači. I had a full-time job and lived on my own—a major, adult accomplishment in a sadly socialist society where people grew old living with their parents, perpetual...
Joshua asked himself. All human feelings are derived from pleasure, pain, and desire—but most important, Spin could say to Rise, from the beat. And what if he said nothing? What if he was the strong, silent type? Why this and not that? Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking...
I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drums: the sonorous, ponderous thudd...
