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
ethics morality
Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
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 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.
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.
long stories language
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
war literature never-quit
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
writing literature assumption
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
thinking humanity stories
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.