Bosnian-born Hemon (The Lazarus Project) again beautifully twists the language in this collection of eight powerful and disquieting stories. The 1992 Bosnian war colors in the background of all the tales, whose settings range from Africa to Chicago and Sarajevo. Arranged chronologically, all but one feature a Hemon-like narrator named Bogdan, first met as a surly teenager during his diplomat father's assignment in Zaire, where he's happily corrupted by a degenerate American espionage agent. In each successive story, Bogdan recalls the surreal and salient experiences of his life: his youth with his ironically depicted family; his early determination to be a poet; his accidental sojourn in America, where he was caught after the commencement of hostilities in Bosnia; and his return to a "cesspool of insignificant, drizzly suffering," where he has a transformative night interviewing a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Hemon arranges words like gems in a necklace. A necktie is "stretched across the chair seat, like a severed tendon"; a car is "stickered with someone else's thought"; a character's teeth are "like organ pipes." Writing with steely control and an antic eye, Hemon has assembled another extraordinary work. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this book of eight short stories by Bosnian American writer Hemon (The Lazarus Project), the bold, humorous, and unpredictable writing makes readers forget that love has been coupled with other nouns in book titles so frequently that it's become cliche. The same narrator links the stories; some characters are recurring; and, as in some of Hemon's earlier fiction, a common theme is the narrator's active role in shaping his own persona, an endeavor that transcends nationality. In "Death of the American Commando," the narrator tells a young woman interviewing him for a documentary a grotesque fabrication from his childhood that counteracts the charming stories his mother told her when she visited his family. In "The Noble Truths of Suffering," the narrator, after some success himself as a writer, is barely able to hide his affected aloofness in the presence of a Pulitzer Prize winner. In both stories, the narrator loathes and craves their adulation. Readers who've enjoyed Hemon's earlier fiction won't be disappointed; readers who are new to Hemon will be grateful that they've discovered a refreshingly uncorrupted voice. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-K. H. Cumiskey, Duke Univ. Libs., Durham, NC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Beginning with the lancing stories in The Question of Bruno (2000) and extending into his tour de force, The Lazarus Project (2008), MacArthur fellow Hemon has been grappling with home, hate, and war within the crushing and ludicrous adventures of young Bosnian men growing up in doomed Yugoslavia, then plunging into the confounding demands of exile in America. In this riveting cycle of linked stories-within-stories, Hemon's wannabe-poet narrator is abruptly introduced to geopolitical sleaze in Kinshasa, where his diplomat father is posted in 1983. Back home in Sarajevo, he runs amok on his first solo journey and sits at the feet of a celebrated poet, fueled by both reverence and resentment. He then travels to America just before war breaks out and discovers that obstacles to love loom everywhere. Possessed of a phenomenal gift for translating feelings into concrete imagery in masterfully structured tales that end in stunning crescendos, Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, and unquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers. Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist