If we didn’t have a stupid softball game tonight, we’d be front and center for a reading by Aleksandar Hemon.
Hemon’s previous book, The Lazarus Project, was one of last year’s best novels, as we said in our review. His new collection of stories, Love and Obstacles, has already given us two shockingly good reads (“The Bees, Part 1” and “The Conductor”), and we’re not even finished reading it. Hemon keeps one foot in the American excesses of Chicago, and one foot in war-torn Bosnia’s recent past. He’s an exciting, frustrating, and frequently unsettling writer.
One day soon we’ll post a full review of Love and Obstacles. Tonight, give him a listen, and let us know how it goes.
UPDATE: For a quick introduction to Aleksandar Hemon, here’s an interview at The Daily Beast.
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Dude! Ben Keene wants to throw me off the softball team because I called the whole sport stupid. Hey, Ben: the reader in me thinks softball is stupid, but the crazy RBI-hitting machine that lives in my chest (and sometimes drops a fly ball in left field due to a programming error that will be fixed in subsequent software patches) thinks reading is stupid. I contain multitudes. Deal with it!
You should apparently give up on any remaining jockish aspirations and just give in to your word-nerd side. Or quit complaining about softball games preempting readings.
Jk!