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Showing 1 - 20 of 20 matches in All Departments
'A staggering work of beauty and brutality' - Douglas Stuart As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can't put in perspective. And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto's protector and lover. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman that will truly survive. 'This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon's masterpiece' - David Mitchell
The epic, cross-continental tale of a love so strong it conquers the Great War, revolution, and even death itself. As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can’t put in perspective. And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto’s protector and lover. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman that will truly survive.
'A staggering work of beauty and brutality' - Douglas Stuart As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can't put in perspective. And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto's protector and lover. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman that will truly survive. 'This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon's masterpiece' - David Mitchell
"Let us not mince words here: Danilo Kis's Garden, Ashes is an unmitigated masterpiece, surely not just one of the best books about the Holocaust, but one of the greatest books of the past century." Aleksandar Hemon, from the introduction
Aleksandar Hemon grew up in a blissful Sarajevo, where his childhood was consumed by football, his adolescence by friends, movies and girls and where, as a young man, he poked at the pretensions of his beloved city with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then at twenty-seven Hemon flew to Chicago for a month-long visit. A matter of weeks later Sarajevo was engulfed in an atrocious war and Hemon found himself an exile - he wouldn't return home for five years, and when he did, he found his city irrevocably changed.
A new book of linked stories by the author of the National Book
Award finalist "The Lazarus Project."
The only novel from MacArthur Genius Award winner, Aleksandar Hemon
-- the National Book Critics Circle Award winning "The Lazarus
Project."
Two magnificent memoirs by Aleksandar Hemon, presented together in a glorious single edition: together they make a major work from one of our major writers. In My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents’ immigration to Canada – of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo, and the new lives his parents were forced to build. He portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother’s lonely upbringing, his father’s fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course – his parents, sister, uncles, cousins – and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians, and a few befuddled Canadians. My Parents is grounded in stories lovingly polished by retelling, but made thrilling and fresh in writing, summoning unexpected laughs in the midst of the heartbreaking narratives. This Does Not Belong to You, meanwhile, is the exhilarating, freewheeling, unabashedly personal companion to My Parents – a perfect dose of Hemon at his most dazzling and untempered in a series of beautifully distilled memories and observations about his family, friends and childhood in Sarajevo, presented as explosive, hilarious, poignant miniatures. Together these two books complement each other and form a major work from a major writer. Hemon has never been better than here and the moment has never been more ready for his voice, nor has the world ever been more in need of it.
This collection of stories about love, war, espionage and beekeeping is an elegy for the vanished Yugoslavia, and a journey through the intertwined history of a family and a nation.
"Psalm 44" is the last major work of fiction by Danilo Kiš to be translated into English, and his only novel dealing explicitly with Auschwitz (where his own father died). Written when he was only twenty-five, before embarking on the masterpieces that would make him an integral figure in twentieth-century letters, Psalm 44 shows Kiš at his most lyrical and unguarded, demonstrating that even in "the place of dragons... covered with the shadow of death," there can still be poetry. Featuring characters based on actual inmates and warders -- including the abominable Dr. Mengele -- "Psalm 44" is a baring of many of the themes, patterns, and preoccupations Kiš would return to in future, albeit never with the same starkness or immediacy.
With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon
Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language literature was a wide variety of new ideas, styles, and ways of seeing the world. Yet times have changed, and how much do we even know about the richly diverse literature being written in Europe today? Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur Genius-Award winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what s happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered. List of contributors Preface: Zadie Smith Introduction: Aleksandar Hemon Ornela Vorpsi (Albania): from The Country Where No One Ever Dies Antonio Fian (Austria): from While Sleeping Peter Terrin (Belgium: Dutch): from "The Murderer" Jean-Philippe Toussaint (Belgium: French): "Zidane's Melancholy" Igor Stiks (Bosnia): "At the Sarajevo Market" Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria): "And All Turned Moon" Neven Usumovic (Croatia): "Veres" Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark): "Bulbjerg" Elo Viiding (Estonia): "Foreign Women" Juhani Brander (Finland): from Extinction Christine Montalbetti (France): "Hotel Komaba Eminence" (with Haruki Murakami) George Konrad (Hungary): "Jeremiah's Terrible Tale" Steinar Bragi (Iceland): "The Sky Over Thingvellir" Julian Gough (Ireland: English): "The Orphan and the Mob" Ornani Choileain (Ireland: Irish): "Camino" Giulio Mozzi (AKA Carlo Dalcielo) (Italy): "Carlo Doesn't Know How to Read" Inga Abele (Latvia): "Ants and Bumblebees" Mathias Ospelt (Liechtenstein): "Deep In the Snow" Giedra Radvilaviciute (Lithuania): "The Allure of the Text" Goce Smilevski (Macedonia): "Fourteen Little Gustavs" Stephan Enter (Netherlands): "Resistance" Jon Fosse (Norway): "Waves of Stone" Michal Witkowski (Poland): "Didi" Valter Hugo Mae (Portugal): "dona malva and senhor jose ferreiro" Cosmin Manolache (Romania): "Three Hundred Cups" Victor Pelevin (Russia): "Friedmann Space" David Albahari (Serbia): "The Basilica in Lyon" Peter Kristufek (Slovakia): from The Prompter Andrej Blatnik (Slovenia): from You Do Understand? Julian Rios (Spain: Castilian): "Revelation on the Boulevard of Crime" Josep Fonalleras (Spain: Catalan): "Noir in Five Parts and an Epilogue" Peter Stamm (Switzerland): "Ice Moon" Deborah Levy (United Kingdom: England): from Swimming Home Alasdair Gray (United Kingdom: Scotland): "The Ballad of Ann Bonny" Penny Simpson (United Kingdom: Wales): "Indigo's Mermaid"
'Aleksandar Hemon has established himself as that rare thing, an essential writer. Another small act of defiance against this narrowing world' Observer 'His language sings . . . I should not be surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point' Giles Foden In Aleksandar Hemon's electrifying first book, The Question of Bruno, Jozef Pronek left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, he began to make his way in a foreign land and his adventures were unforgettable. Now Pronek, the accidental nomad, gets his own book, and startles us into yet more exhilarating ways of seeing the world anew. 'If the plot is mercury, quick and elusive, sentence by sentence and word for word, Aleksandar Hemon's writing is gold' Times Literary Supplement 'Downbeat but also hilarious, while the writing itself is astonishing' Time Out 'Hemon can't write a boring sentence, and the English language is the richer for it' New York Times 'Sheer exuberance, generosity and engagement with life' Sunday Times In Aleksandar Hemon's electrifying first book, The Question of Bruno, Jozef Pronek left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, he began to make his way in a foreign land and his adventures were unforgettable. Now Pronek, the accidental nomad, gets his own book, and startles us into yet more exhilarating ways of seeing the world anew.
'A raucous, hilarious book . . . deadly funny.' Chicago Magazine Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancee 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, Aleksandar Hemon's The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence.
'A dream sequence of endlessly shifting memories of sex, disappointment, violence, migration and ambition in which identity - and the definition of a story itself - is in a traumatised, exhilarating state of flux' "Metro" The explosive perils of adolescence, a Communist yet cosmopolitan country that falls apart, and the overwhelming vertigo of a new life abroad: this is life in which love is only one of many obstacles. Linked by a young man finding his awkward way in the world, and shadowed by a sixth sense for the absurdities of experience, these restlessly inventive stories are shot through with deadpan humour and heartbreaking truth, found in the most surprising of places. 'A dazzling collection of stories, further cementing Hemon's position among the finest fiction writers working in English' "GQ" 'Hemon's style, muscular, original, lyrical yet anchored, irons out the lazy creases in language' "The Times" '"Love and Obstacles" presents itself as a collection of short stories, but in reality is something far stranger and richer. Infinitely vibrant and alive' "Financial Times"
A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
First published in 1891, this morality tale pits a scientist, a government worker, his mistress, a deacon, and a physician against one another in a verbal battle of wits and ethics that explodes into a violent contest: the duel. When Laevsky, a lazy youth who works for the government, tires of his dependent mistress, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, Von Koren, the scientist, delivers a scathing critique of Loevsky’s egotism, forcing the young man to examine his soul. The Duel is a tale of human weakness, the possibility of forgiveness, and a man’s ultimate ability to change his ways. It is classic Chekhov, revealing the multifaceted essence of human nature.
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