Aleksandar Hemon’s Kaleidoscopic Fiction

If Americans remember one thing about Sarajevo, it’s that the city was besieged for almost four years during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. If they know a second thing, it’s that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated there in 1914, lighting the fuse for the First World War. Born in Sarajevo in 1964, Aleksandar Hemon spent the first part of his literary career coming to terms with the more recent tragedy, writing novels and stories that dramatized his own experience as a Bosnian exile in the United States.