Books about Aleksandar from Amazon.com

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: America has a richer literary landscape since Aleksandar Hemon, stranded in the United States in 1992 after war broke out in his native Sarajevo, adopted Chicago as his new home. He completed his first short story within three years of learning to write in English, and since then his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review and in two acclaimed books, The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. In The Lazarus Project, his most ambitious and imaginative work yet, Hemon brings to life an epic narrative born from a historical event: the 1908 killing of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Jewish immigrant who was shot dead by George Shippy, the chief of Chicago police, after being admitted into his home to deliver an important letter. The mystery of what really happened that day remains unsolved (Shippy claimed Averbuch was an anarchist with ill intent) and from this opening set piece Hemon springs a century ahead to tell the story of Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-American writer living in Chicago who gets funding to travel to Eastern Europe and unearth what really happened. The Lazarus Project deftly weaves the two stories together, cross-cutting the aftermath of Lazarus's death with Brik's journey and the tales from his traveling partner, Rora, a Bosnian war photographer. And while the novel will remind readers of many great books before it--Ragtime, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Everything Is Illuminated--it is a masterful literary adventure that manages to be grand in scope and intimate in detail. It's an incredibly rewarding reading experience that's not to be missed. --Brad Thomas Parsons.
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Aleksandar Hemon moved to the U.S. from Bosnia in the early 1990s, prior to the siege of Sarajevo He swiftly learned English and began writing, in his adopted language, stories about the traumas of immigrant experience and the pain of witnessing the war from his American exile. His impressive debut, The Question of Bruno, may lack the fluency and imaginative élan of Kundera and the linguistic density and sophistication of Conrad (both of whom Hemon specifically invokes), yet these stories have a haunting power that lingers long after a first reading.

By turns tragic and darkly comic, the stories are a mixed bag in terms of style. They are unified, however, by theme. In "Islands," for example, a boy and his family visit their Uncle Julius on the island of Mljet, which is infested by the very mongooses that were imported to deal with the snake problem. Julius, veteran of a Stalinist prison camp, takes a stoical tack: "So that's how it is, he said, it's all one pest after another, like revolutions." And when the family returns to Sarajevo, they are greeted by their neglected, starved cat, shaking "with irreversible hatred." The hungry feline returns in another story, when we learn that Sarajevo under siege was filled with starving cats, which were eaten by starving dogs. If it's symbolism you're after, look no further.

One of the best stories, "The Sorge Spy Ring," wonderfully evokes a sad childhood spent in the shadow of Tito's cold war repressions. A man buys his son a portable telegraph set, and the two communicate in Morse code in the privacy of their own home--but later the father is arrested for espionage, and as Tito finally dies, he too languishes on his deathbed, weakly sucking a banana. The image is both poignant and pathetic. It's also the sort of tight close-up that Hemon loves (the camera and the television are dominant images, as one might expect from a writer who resorts to CNN to find out what's happening at home). There are moments when his language is slightly unidiomatic and offkey, as if he's leaned too heavily on a well-thumbed thesaurus. On the whole, though, this is an honest, vivid, and sometimes brilliant collection. --Jonathan Allison.
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Following his critically acclaimed short story collection, The Question of Bruno, Aleksandar Hemon's debut novel Nowhere Man confirms that an important new voice has arrived Unlike other Eastern European coming-of-age novels, Nowhere Man bucks chronological order, spanning the 1990s and sometimes reading like a memoir. Jozef Pronek, who grew up dreaming of hitting it big with his Beatles cover band, wanders through his adopted Chicago while the Bosnia conflict rages on, working as a process server and for Greenpeace, where he meets his girlfriend, Rachel. Jozef spends time in Kiev with American graduate students, such as the uncannily depicted Will, "blonde and suburbanly ... [as if his] family procreated by fission," and Vivian, "pale and in need of a carrot or something." He rooms with Victor Plavchuk, a conflicted doctoral student in literature who develops a crush on Jozef (and who is reminiscent of a subdued Charles Kinbote from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire). Jozef is sublimely complex, embodying the listlessness and frank practicality of expatriates whose homeland is being shredded by violent conflict. Jozef wonders, "Why couldn't he be more than one person? Why was he stuck in the middle of himself, hungry and tired?" while a woman "[keeps] her hands in the pockets of her formerly blue jacket, as if despair were a marble in her pocket." Hemon's wit is also present: "The only thing that distinguished Pronek in school was that he never, ever volunteered to do anything." Nowhere Man is a somber, saddening, yet vibrant and warm debut novel. --Michael Ferch.
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Since the 1980s, multimedia and new technologies have had a great impact on theatre, allowing performance to establish its own language of communication with the audience independent of the written text. Robert Lepage is one of the pioneers and main exponents of mixed-media performance, internationally renowned for a notoriously distinct aesthetic. Aleksandar Dundjerovic, in the first book to explore Lepage's practical work, offers a comprehensive analysis of his creative process, his "transformative mise-en-scene." The Theatricality of Robert Lepage studies several productions, including The Dragons' Trilogy, Vinci and Tectonic Plates, The Seven Streams of River Ota, Zulu Time, and The Far Side of the Moon. Dundjerovic provides major new insights into Lepage's creative process through an examination of his workshops, open rehearsals, and performances, as well as interviews with Lepage and his collaborators. Outlining the key production elements of Lepage's theatricality, Dundjerovic provides a practitioner's view of how Lepage creates as a director, actor, and writer and explores Lepage's practice within both the local Québécois and the international theatre context..
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Sadie Benning is not only among the country's most respected and influential video artists, she also broke cultural ground as a founding member of the multimedia feminist band Le Tigre. Suspended Animation, the first monograph on the artist and the catalogue of her first U.S. museum exhibition, introduces Benning's paintings and Play Pause, an ambitious new two-channel video installation. Benning's videos, which she began to make in the late 1980s with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 "toy camera," are known for their explorations of loneliness, alienation, gender ambiguity and her own developing lesbian identity. Benning's recent paintings--flat, illustrative, exuberant--are playful, imaginary portraits that address similar themes. Play Pause, created entirely from hundreds of Benning's drawings, offers a rhythmic and affectionate view of contemporary life in a city's streets, parks and gay bars. Includes written contributions by Eileen Myles and Aleksandar Hemon, and a conversation with the New York painter Amy Sillman..
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Among the many branches of philosophy, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language are more intimately interconnected than most, yet their practitioners have long pursued independent paths. This book helps to bridge the gap between the two groups. As it makes clear, it is increasingly difficult to do philosophy of language without any metaphysical commitments as to the nature of time, and it is equally difficult to resolve the metaphysical question of whether time is tensed or tenseless independently of the philosophy of language. Indeed, one is tempted to see philosophy of language and metaphysics as a continuum with no sharp boundary.

The essays, which were written expressly for this book by leading philosophers of language and philosophers of time, discuss the philosophy of language and its implications for the philosophy of time and vice versa. The intention is not only to further dialogue between philosophers of language and of time but also to present new theories to advance the state of knowledge in the two fields. The essays are organized in two sections -- one on the philosophy of tensed language, the other on the metaphysics of time..
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Anthropological practice has been dominated by the so-called great traditions (Anglo-American, French, and German). However, processes of decolonization, along with critical interrogation of these dominant narratives, have led to greater visibility of what used to be seen as peripheral scholarship. With contributions from leading anthropologists and social scientists from different countries and anthropological traditions, this volume gives voice to scholars outside these great traditions. It shows the immense variety of methodologies, training, and approaches that scholars from these regions bring to anthropology and the social sciences in general, thus enriching the disciplines in important ways at an age marked by multiculturalism, globalization and transnationalism..
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