Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemonis a Bosnian-born American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. His best known novels are Nowhere Manand The Lazarus Project...
NationalityBosniak
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth9 September 1964
blow reality artist
I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
real long waiting
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
america agency choices
I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
novelists kind call-me
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
philosophical thinking should-have
I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.
mean writing want
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
literature fiction-and-nonfiction bosnians
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
writing brain fiction
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
lines facts fiction
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
war mean swings
When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.
memories legends fantasy
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
country sadness car
My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
long able becoming
I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.
soccer play cities
I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.