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
book ideas space
I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.
struggle fighting space
There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.
thinking space giving
I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.
cities space people
Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
space outsiders sovereign
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
wall writing space
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
full means swing war
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.
book solidarity reader
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
political demand moral
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
book important may
To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.
clear reader
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
writing effort noble
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
hate writing encounters
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
thinking artist able
Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.