Last year, a teenager in a trench coat shot to death five people in a crowded Salt Lake City shopping mall, before being gunned down himself by police. The story caught the writer Aleksandar Hemon's eye not for its horrible post-Columbine banality, but because of a detail about the shooter -- he was a Bosnian Muslim refugee from Srebrenica, Europe's bloodiest killing field since World War II. Without presuming to know the boy's demons, Mr. Hemon, who fled Bosnia himself, notes that traumas of war and exile lurk deep inside.Nelson Algren said loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose, and loving Sarajevo is like loving a woman with a broken spine."
Mr. Hemon is often put in good company with W.G. Sebald, Joseph Roth and Bruno Schultz as well as his generational "immigrant-lit" cohorts -- Gary Shteyngart and this year's Pulitzer winner, Junot Diaz.
He acknowledges literary debts to the late Montenegrin-Jewish writer Danilo Kis and his favorite of favorites, Anton Chekhov.
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