Aleksandar Hemon

"This is Aleksandar Hemon at his most intimate and most urgent, the book he was literally born to write: the stories of his parents, of his own arrival in this world, of dislocation and immigration"--

A native of Sarajevo, where he spends his adolescence trying to become Bosnia's answer to John Lennon, Jozef Pronek comes to the United States in 1992-just in time to watch war break out in his country, but too early to be a genuine refugee. Indeed, Jozef's typical answer to inquiries about his origins and ethnicity is, "I am complicated." And so he proves to be-not just to himself, but to the revolving series of shadowy but insightful narrators...

Now in its third year, the annual Best European Fiction anthology has become a mainstay in the literary landscape. For 2012, editor Aleksandar Hemon has organized the stories not by country but by theme (love, desire, family, thought, art home, work, evil). In his introduction, he tells us that the intention is to place the stories "in the situation of dialogue and to show what we have always known: the infinite variation of human experience, which...