Love and Obstacles »

Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon came to Chicago in 1992. The author of the acclaimed Nowhere Man and The Question of Bruno, he writes stories and essays that appear regularly in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

If this collection of stories is any indication, the Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon is suspicious of both coming-of-age stories and the dysfunctional family memoirs that have turned out to be a publishing staple. That may be an odd way to describe a collection of linked autobiographical stories, told in the first person, that carry the Bosnian narrator from adolescence to the first flourishings of his writing career.

But Hemon seems to understand the potential for narcissism that lurks in both the coming-of-age tale and the memoir. As welcome as depictions of our adolescent awkwardness can be, if only to affirm that we were not alone in the uncertainty and embarrassments of those years, too many writers have confused callowness with charm. They expect us to be won over by lumpen young protagonists, usually male, whose shallow souls are often as pimply as their faces. And the torrent of family memoirs that shows no signs of abating can make you wonder if we will see some kind of affirmative action for writers who had happy childhoods in order that they, too, may get a book contract.