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Riverhead Hardcover
May 2009
On Sale: May 14, 2009
224 pages ISBN: 1594488649 EAN: 9781594488641 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation— and his
MacArthur “genius grant”—for his short stories, and he
returns to the form with a powerful collection of linked
stories that stands with The Lazarus Project as the best
work of his celebrated career. A few of the stories have
never been published before; the others have appeared in
The New Yorker, and several of those have also been
included in The Best American Short Stories. All are
infused with the dazzling, astonishingly creative prose and
the remarkable, haunting autobiographical elements that
have distinguished Hemon as one of the most original and
illustrious voices of our time. What links the stories in Love and Obstacles is the
narrator, a young man who—like Hemon himself—was raised in
Yugoslavia and immigrated to the United States. The stories
of Love and Obstacles are about that coming of age and the
complications—the obstacles—of growing up in a Communist
but cosmopolitan country, and the disintegration of that
country and the consequent uprooting and move to America in
young adulthood. But because it’s Aleksandar Hemon, the
stories extend far beyond the immigrant experience; each
one is punctuated with unexpected humor and spins out in
fabulist, exhilarating directions, ultimately building to
an insightful, often heartbreaking conclusion. Woven
together, these stories comprise a book that is, genuinely,
as cohesive and powerful as any fiction— achingly human,
charming, and inviting.
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