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Aleksandar Hemon

Born

in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

September 09, 1964

Website

http://www.aleksandarhemon.com/

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction

Influences

Vladimir Nabokov, Kafka, Danilo Kiš ...more

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Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian American writer known for his short stories and novels that explore issues of exile, identity, and home through characters drawn from Hemon’s own experience as an immigrant.

Hemon was raised in Sarajevo, where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990, he worked as a journalist with the Sarajevan youth press. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him to Chicago. Hemon intended to stay in the United States only briefly, for the duration of the program, but, when war broke out in his home country, he applied for and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States.

In Ch Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian American writer known for his short stories and novels that explore issues of exile, identity, and home through characters drawn from Hemon’s own experience as an immigrant.

Hemon was raised in Sarajevo, where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990, he worked as a journalist with the Sarajevan youth press. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him to Chicago. Hemon intended to stay in the United States only briefly, for the duration of the program, but, when war broke out in his home country, he applied for and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States.

In Chicago Hemon worked a series of jobs, including as a bike messenger and a door-to-door canvasser, while improving his knowledge of English and pursuing a graduate degree at Northwestern University. Three years after arriving in the United States, he wrote his first short story in English, “The Sorge Spy Ring.” Together with several other short stories and the novella “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” it was published in the collection The Question of Bruno in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Like much of Hemon’s published work, these stories were largely informed by Hemon’s own immigrant experience in Chicago. Hemon brought back Jozef Pronek, the protagonist from his earlier novella, with Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (2002), the story of a young man growing up in Sarajevo who later attempts to navigate a new life in Chicago while working minimum-wage jobs. The book, like the rest of Hemon’s work, was notable for the author’s inventive use of the English language. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2004.

The Lazarus Project (2008) intertwined two stories of eastern European immigrants to Chicago. Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian immigrant writer and the novel’s narrator, becomes obsessed with a murder case from nearly a century earlier in which Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jew, was shot and killed by Chicago’s police chief. Hemon received much critical acclaim for the novel, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. He followed this with Love and Obstacles (2009), a collection of short stories narrated by a young man who leaves Sarajevo for the United States when war breaks out in his home country. The Making of Zombie Wars (2015) chronicles the quotidian difficulties of a workaday writer attempting to finish a screenplay about a zombie invasion.

Hemon also cowrote the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections (2021), the fourth installment in the popular sci-fi Matrix series. His other works included the memoirs The Book of My Lives (2013) and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (2019). The latter book consists of two volumes. ...more

Combine Editions
Aleksandar Hemon’s books

Average rating: 3.87 · 31,757 ratings · 3,996 reviews · 67 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Lazarus Project 3.57 avg rating — 6,833 ratings — published 2008 — 57 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Book of My Lives 4.18 avg rating — 3,453 ratings — published 2013 — 38 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Nowhere Man 3.70 avg rating — 2,630 ratings — published 2002 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The World and All That It Holds 3.85 avg rating — 2,289 ratings — published 2023 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Question of Bruno 3.94 avg rating — 1,543 ratings — published 2000 — 50 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Love and Obstacles 3.83 avg rating — 1,483 ratings — published 2008 — 30 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Making of Zombie Wars 3.09 avg rating — 1,062 ratings — published 2015 — 27 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You 4.07 avg rating — 737 ratings — published 2019 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Best European Fiction 2010 3.78 avg rating — 254 ratings — published 2009 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Best European Fiction 2011 by Aleksandar Hemon (Editor), Colum McCann (Goodreads Author) (Preface) 3.85 avg rating — 172 ratings — published 2010 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Aleksandar Hemon…

Quotes by Aleksandar Hemon (?)

“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

292 likes

“When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

185 likes

“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

91 likes

See all Aleksandar Hemon's quotes »

Polls

What will be our open pick book for September, 2016?

Please take into account the availability, cost, and length of books when voting for them. Remember, if you vote for a book and it wins, you are implicitly promising to read the book and participate in the discussion. The poll will be open through July 31st. Discussion will begin September 1st.

All the Living by C.E. Morgan

6 votes, 28.6%

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth Mckenzie

6 votes, 28.6%

The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

5 votes, 23.8%

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

4 votes, 19.0%

The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon

0 votes, 0.0%

21 total votes

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