Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Aleksandar Hemon,
read by Condola Rashad, Boyd Gaines, B.D. Wong, and Rita Wolf. Selected Shorts, , unabridged, two CDs, 2 hrs., $19.95 ISBN 978-1-934033-15-9
In Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck,” a young Nigerian immigrant is both adored and objectified by her white boyfriend. Condola Rashad’s narration gives the story energy, but her American accent fails to convey the narrator’s Igbo cadences. In...
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Aleksandar Hemon, Author . Doubleday/Talese $23.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-385-49924-8
Jozef Pronek, the quirky Sarajevan who captured the imagination of readers in Hemon's acclaimed story collection (The Question of Bruno), gets full-length treatment in this acutely self-aware and tender first novel. Hemon plunges into the inner...
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Aleksandar Hemon, Author . Riverhead $25.95 (209p) ISBN 978-1-59448-864-1
Bosnian-born Hemon (The Lazarus Project
) again beautifully twists the language in this collection of eight powerful and disquieting stories. The 1992 Bosnian war colors in the background of all the tales, whose settings range from Africa to Chicago
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Aleksandar Hemon, Author Nan A. Talese $22.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-385-49923-1
Much like his protagonist in the novella Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, the cornerstone of this collection of eight stories, Hemon came to the U.S. as a tourist, but had to stay as a refugee when his native Yugoslavia splintered apart. The...
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Aleksandar Hemon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 (224p) ISBN 978-0-374-11573-9
Hemon is known for fiction like Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, but this work is his first volume of nonfiction. A collection of 15 mostly previously published essays assembled in somewhat...
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Aleksandar Hemon. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-0-374-20341-2
Spinozan philosophy meets screwball comedy in this eccentric, subtly experimental novel by Hemon (The Book of My Lives). Thirtysomething Chicagoan Josh Levin is an ESL teacher and aspiring screenwriter hard at work on a script about a zombie...
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Aleksandar Hemon, Author, Velibor Bozovic, Photographer, Chicago Historical Society, Photographer . Riverhead $24.95 (294p) ISBN 978-1-59448-988-4
MacArthur genius Hemon in his third book (after Nowhere Man
) intelligently unpacks 100 years’ worth of immigrant disillusion, displacement and desperation. As fears of the anarchist movement roil 1908 Chicago, the chief of police guns down...
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Aleksandar Hemon. MCD, $28 (384p) ISBN 978-0-374-21743-3
MacArthur fellow Hemon (The Lazarus Project) recounts his Bosnian family’s journey from hopeful progress to exile in this richly reflective two-volume memoir. My Parents follows his father and mother as they rose from impoverished rural backgrounds...
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Aleksandar Hemon. MCD, $27 (352p) ISBN 978-0-374-28770-2
Three-time NBCC finalist Hemon (The Lazarus Project) returns with a potent story of love, war, and displacement in the early 20th century. Rafael Pinto, a Bosnian Jew, returns from schooling in Vienna and takes over his recently deceased father’s...
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Edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. Avid Reader, $27 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5011-9040-7
Husband and wife Chabon (Moonglow) and Waldman (A Really Good Day) gather dozens of prominent writers to commemorate the ACLU’s centennial with powerful, inspiring essays on the legal organization’s milestone cases. Addressing City of Chicago v....
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