Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation and his MacArthur genius grantfor 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 wholike Hemon himselfwas raised in Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the complicationsthe obstaclesof 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 its 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.

From inside front cover: A novella and stories that are linked by characters, by locations, by interwoven substories, and by a literary voice ... Set in Chicago and Sarajevo, it is a book about the trauma of war, about how an exile makes a new life in a new land. Some of the stories in the book have appeared, in different form, in the following publications: "Islands" in Ploughsares and Best American Short Stories, 1999; "The Life and Work of Aphonse Kauders" in TriQuarterly and, in Serbo-Croatian, in Best Yugoslav Short Stories 1990; "The Sorge Spy Ring." in TriQuarterly; "Exchange of Pleasant Words" in Granta; "A Coin" in Chicago Review; and extracts from "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" in The New Yorker and The Baffler.

"The seriously, seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence that Aleksandar Hemon has long promised Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiance;e of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek. 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. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: The Righteous Love. 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. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain. Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL 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. 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. Disaster ensues, and as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence"-- "A novel about an aspiring screenplay writer--full of script ideas but unable to follow through on any of them--who becomes entangled with a Bosnian woman and her violently jealous husband"--