What do you think?
Rate this book
Best European Fiction 2013
2013 may be the best year yet for Best European Fiction. The inimitable John Banville joins the list of distinguished preface writers for Aleksandar Hemon’s series, and A. S. Byatt represents England among a luminous cast of European contributors. Fans of the series will find everything they’ve grown to love, while new readers will discover what they’ve been missing!
SLOVAKIA: Balla, Before the Breakup
MACEDONIA: Žarko Kujundžiski, When the Glasses Are Lost
MONTENEGRO: Dragan Radulović, The Face
GEORGIA: Lasha Bugadze, The Sins of the Wolf
BELGIUM: Paul Emond, Grand Froid
ARMENIA: Krikor Beledian, The Name under My Tongue
RUSSIA: Kirill Kobrin, Last Summer in Marienbad
MOLDOVA: Vitalie Ciobanu, Orchestra Rehearsal
IRELAND: Tomás Mac Síomóin, Music in the Bone
FINLAND: Tiina Raevaara, My Creator, My Creation
HUNGARY: Miklós Vajda, Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame
TURKEY: Zehra Çırak, Memory Cultivation Salon
PORTUGAL: Dulce Maria Cardoso, Angels on the Inside
LATVIA: Gundega Repše, How Important is it to be Ernest?
UKRAINE: Tania Malyarchuk, Me and My Sacred Cow
SPAIN (Castilian): Eloy Tizón, The Mercury in the Thermometers
BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart
AUSTRIA: Lydia Mischkulnig, A Protagonist’s Nemesis
FRANCE: Marie Redonnet, Madame Zabee’s Guesthouse
LITHUANIA: Ieva Toleikytė, The Eye of the Maples
BULGARIA: Rumen Balabanov, The Ragiad
UK, ENGLAND: A.S. Byatt, Dolls’ Eyes
ESTONIA: Kristiina Ehin, The Surrealist’s Daughter
POLAND: Sylwia Chutnik, It’s All Up to You
LIECHTENSTEIN: Daniel Batliner, Malcontent’s Monologue
SPAIN (Basque): Bernardo Atxaga, Pirpo and Chanberlan, Murderers
SERBIA: Borivoje Adašević, For a Foreign Master
SLOVENIA: Mirana Likar Bajželj, Nada’s Tablecloth
DENMARK: Christina Hesselholdt, Camilla and the Horse
ROMANIA: Dan Lungu, 7 P.M. Wife
SWITZERLAND: Bernard Comment, A Son
UK, WALES: Ray French, Migration
IRELAND: Mike McCormack, Of One Mind
ICELAND: Gyrðir Elíasson, The Music Shop
NORWAY: Ari Behn, Thunder Snow and When a Dollar Was a Big Deal
SLOVAKIA: Balla, Before the Breakup
MACEDONIA: Žarko Kujundžiski, When the Glasses Are Lost
MONTENEGRO: Dragan Radulović, The Face
GEORGIA: Lasha Bugadze, The Sins of the Wolf
BELGIUM: Paul Emond, Grand Froid
ARMENIA: Krikor Beledian, The Name under My Tongue
RUSSIA: Kirill Kobrin, Last Summer in Marienbad
MOLDOVA: Vitalie Ciobanu, Orchestra Rehearsal
IRELAND: Tomás Mac Síomóin, Music in the Bone
FINLAND: Tiina Raevaara, My Creator, My Creation
HUNGARY: Miklós Vajda, Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame
TURKEY: Zehra Çırak, Memory Cultivation Salon
PORTUGAL: Dulce Maria Cardoso, Angels on the Inside
LATVIA: Gundega Repše, How Important is it to be Ernest?
UKRAINE: Tania Malyarchuk, Me and My Sacred Cow
SPAIN (Castilian): Eloy Tizón, The Mercury in the Thermometers
BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart
AUSTRIA: Lydia Mischkulnig, A Protagonist’s Nemesis
FRANCE: Marie Redonnet, Madame Zabee’s Guesthouse
LITHUANIA: Ieva Toleikytė, The Eye of the Maples
BULGARIA: Rumen Balabanov, The Ragiad
UK, ENGLAND: A.S. Byatt, Dolls’ Eyes
ESTONIA: Kristiina Ehin, The Surrealist’s Daughter
POLAND: Sylwia Chutnik, It’s All Up to You
LIECHTENSTEIN: Daniel Batliner, Malcontent’s Monologue
SPAIN (Basque): Bernardo Atxaga, Pirpo and Chanberlan, Murderers
SERBIA: Borivoje Adašević, For a Foreign Master
SLOVENIA: Mirana Likar Bajželj, Nada’s Tablecloth
DENMARK: Christina Hesselholdt, Camilla and the Horse
ROMANIA: Dan Lungu, 7 P.M. Wife
SWITZERLAND: Bernard Comment, A Son
UK, WALES: Ray French, Migration
IRELAND: Mike McCormack, Of One Mind
ICELAND: Gyrðir Elíasson, The Music Shop
NORWAY: Ari Behn, Thunder Snow and When a Dollar Was a Big Deal
463 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2012
10 people are currently reading
196 people want to read
About the author
Aleksandar Hemon
70 books889 followersAleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian American writer known for his short stories and novels that explore issues of exile, identity, and home through characters drawn from Hemon’s own experience as an immigrant.
Hemon was raised in Sarajevo, where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990, he worked as a journalist with the Sarajevan youth press. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him to Chicago. Hemon intended to stay in the United States only briefly, for the duration of the program, but, when war broke out in his home country, he applied for and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States.
In Chicago Hemon worked a series of jobs, including as a bike messenger and a door-to-door canvasser, while improving his knowledge of English and pursuing a graduate degree at Northwestern University. Three years after arriving in the United States, he wrote his first short story in English, “The Sorge Spy Ring.” Together with several other short stories and the novella “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” it was published in the collection The Question of Bruno in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Like much of Hemon’s published work, these stories were largely informed by Hemon’s own immigrant experience in Chicago. Hemon brought back Jozef Pronek, the protagonist from his earlier novella, with Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (2002), the story of a young man growing up in Sarajevo who later attempts to navigate a new life in Chicago while working minimum-wage jobs. The book, like the rest of Hemon’s work, was notable for the author’s inventive use of the English language. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2004.
The Lazarus Project (2008) intertwined two stories of eastern European immigrants to Chicago. Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian immigrant writer and the novel’s narrator, becomes obsessed with a murder case from nearly a century earlier in which Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jew, was shot and killed by Chicago’s police chief. Hemon received much critical acclaim for the novel, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. He followed this with Love and Obstacles (2009), a collection of short stories narrated by a young man who leaves Sarajevo for the United States when war breaks out in his home country. The Making of Zombie Wars (2015) chronicles the quotidian difficulties of a workaday writer attempting to finish a screenplay about a zombie invasion.
Hemon also cowrote the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections (2021), the fourth installment in the popular sci-fi Matrix series. His other works included the memoirs The Book of My Lives (2013) and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (2019). The latter book consists of two volumes.
Hemon was raised in Sarajevo, where his father was an engineer and his mother was an accountant. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990, he worked as a journalist with the Sarajevan youth press. In 1992 he participated in a journalist exchange program that took him to Chicago. Hemon intended to stay in the United States only briefly, for the duration of the program, but, when war broke out in his home country, he applied for and was granted status as a political refugee in the United States.
In Chicago Hemon worked a series of jobs, including as a bike messenger and a door-to-door canvasser, while improving his knowledge of English and pursuing a graduate degree at Northwestern University. Three years after arriving in the United States, he wrote his first short story in English, “The Sorge Spy Ring.” Together with several other short stories and the novella “Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls,” it was published in the collection The Question of Bruno in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Like much of Hemon’s published work, these stories were largely informed by Hemon’s own immigrant experience in Chicago. Hemon brought back Jozef Pronek, the protagonist from his earlier novella, with Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies (2002), the story of a young man growing up in Sarajevo who later attempts to navigate a new life in Chicago while working minimum-wage jobs. The book, like the rest of Hemon’s work, was notable for the author’s inventive use of the English language. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2004.
The Lazarus Project (2008) intertwined two stories of eastern European immigrants to Chicago. Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian immigrant writer and the novel’s narrator, becomes obsessed with a murder case from nearly a century earlier in which Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jew, was shot and killed by Chicago’s police chief. Hemon received much critical acclaim for the novel, which was a finalist for a National Book Award. He followed this with Love and Obstacles (2009), a collection of short stories narrated by a young man who leaves Sarajevo for the United States when war breaks out in his home country. The Making of Zombie Wars (2015) chronicles the quotidian difficulties of a workaday writer attempting to finish a screenplay about a zombie invasion.
Hemon also cowrote the screenplay for The Matrix Resurrections (2021), the fourth installment in the popular sci-fi Matrix series. His other works included the memoirs The Book of My Lives (2013) and My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (2019). The latter book consists of two volumes.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 15, 2013
Another fantastic and eclectic collection of euro short stories, with bonus author bios and biblios, and translator bios and biblios. A real desert island book with preface by john banville this go round.
A few I found particularly well written were kirill kobrin Russian, a story of ennui and roving eyes, alighted on a book by “herzen”.
Vitalie ciobanu moldova, about a guy who has to play in the never-ending folk band instead of concentrating on his classical education, and figuring out how to escape the hell that was his country.
Miklos vajda hungary, chronicling the almost unfathomably labyrinthine Hungarian diasporas.
Tania malyarchuk Ukraine, sweet story of young city girl spending her summers on the farm with her old old grandma, and going back in time to country ways. Here’s her intro
“I hated my cow and she hated me.
Even though we were like two peas in a pod: both of us crazy.
We competed with one another in mental abnormality, and the cow always won because she was the better runner. She had four legs, and I only two.”
It’s interesting, these new hemon/dalkey collections, the translators are just as powerful and important as the original writers. Jull costa for example, Spanish and Portuguese into English, and perhaps basque too? Here is great interview with her: http://www.thewhitereview.org/intervi...
A few I found particularly well written were kirill kobrin Russian, a story of ennui and roving eyes, alighted on a book by “herzen”.
Vitalie ciobanu moldova, about a guy who has to play in the never-ending folk band instead of concentrating on his classical education, and figuring out how to escape the hell that was his country.
Miklos vajda hungary, chronicling the almost unfathomably labyrinthine Hungarian diasporas.
Tania malyarchuk Ukraine, sweet story of young city girl spending her summers on the farm with her old old grandma, and going back in time to country ways. Here’s her intro
“I hated my cow and she hated me.
Even though we were like two peas in a pod: both of us crazy.
We competed with one another in mental abnormality, and the cow always won because she was the better runner. She had four legs, and I only two.”
It’s interesting, these new hemon/dalkey collections, the translators are just as powerful and important as the original writers. Jull costa for example, Spanish and Portuguese into English, and perhaps basque too? Here is great interview with her: http://www.thewhitereview.org/intervi...
May 24, 2013
Pure literary pleasure. I can only think of one story in the entire book that I didn't care for. Plenty of reviews have detailed the various stories, no one needs this from me. I can say that a full month after finishing the book, my mind is full of it's stories. The have stuck with me and will continue to be with me. Not just the information contained within the stories, but the ways they made me feel, the thoughts they made me think - this book stays with me.
I checked this book out from my library. I think it would be an even better read as a purchase, when one can take all the time in the world to savor each story individually. It is worthy of the reader's full time and attention. An absolutely perfect compilation of short stories.
I checked this book out from my library. I think it would be an even better read as a purchase, when one can take all the time in the world to savor each story individually. It is worthy of the reader's full time and attention. An absolutely perfect compilation of short stories.
December 4, 2022
Read:
SLOVAKIA: Balla, Before the Breakup
- when problem in marriages show up a growing monsters behind the tv...
GEORGIA: Lasha Bugadze, The Sins of the Wolf
- The reader turns up to bet the author to get her in contact with his character. He eventually writes them in a short story :)
ARMENIA: Krikor Beledian, The Name under My Tongue
- stream of consciousness from a boring academic conference & possibly a revolution?
LIECHTENSTEIN: Daniel Batliner, Malcontent’s Monologue
- A lawyer has seen through society and decides to shed it, and his clothes in the town square.
UKRAINE: Tania Malyarchuk, Me and My Sacred Cow
- a fairitale (think Grim(m), not Disney) from the Ukrainian countryside.
Maybe:
MONTENEGRO: Dragan Radulović, The Face
MOLDOVA: Vitalie Ciobanu, Orchestra Rehearsal
BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart
LITHUANIA: Ieva Toleikytė, The Eye of the Maples
SPAIN (Basque): Bernardo Atxaga, Pirpo and Chanberlan, Murderers
SLOVENIA: Mirana Likar Bajželj, Nada’s Tablecloth
UK, WALES: Ray French, Migration
SLOVAKIA: Balla, Before the Breakup
- when problem in marriages show up a growing monsters behind the tv...
GEORGIA: Lasha Bugadze, The Sins of the Wolf
- The reader turns up to bet the author to get her in contact with his character. He eventually writes them in a short story :)
ARMENIA: Krikor Beledian, The Name under My Tongue
- stream of consciousness from a boring academic conference & possibly a revolution?
LIECHTENSTEIN: Daniel Batliner, Malcontent’s Monologue
- A lawyer has seen through society and decides to shed it, and his clothes in the town square.
UKRAINE: Tania Malyarchuk, Me and My Sacred Cow
- a fairitale (think Grim(m), not Disney) from the Ukrainian countryside.
Maybe:
MONTENEGRO: Dragan Radulović, The Face
MOLDOVA: Vitalie Ciobanu, Orchestra Rehearsal
BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: Semezdin Mehmedinović, My Heart
LITHUANIA: Ieva Toleikytė, The Eye of the Maples
SPAIN (Basque): Bernardo Atxaga, Pirpo and Chanberlan, Murderers
SLOVENIA: Mirana Likar Bajželj, Nada’s Tablecloth
UK, WALES: Ray French, Migration
March 4, 2013
another amazing collection
"when we are not sure, we are alive." -- Graham Greene
"What's important is what was happening in me, that definitive rupture with the Fatherland, however painful I found it. And when a person steps into the next stage of his destiny, there is no way back to the last.
When a person finds himself in a state such as mine, everything around him takes on a different aspect: people seem to laugh differently, walk differently, react to you differently, and you, for that matter, react differently to them. In a word, the world and the people who walk in it appear hostile to you. I would like it not to be so, but that's how it is and now I don't know what I can do about it, apart from describe it. Somehow, I say, everything changes, which means that even the landscape around you seems to change as well." --Borivoje Adašević
A.S.Byatt's story of a lover's unusual betrayal is beautifully drawn.
"when we are not sure, we are alive." -- Graham Greene
"What's important is what was happening in me, that definitive rupture with the Fatherland, however painful I found it. And when a person steps into the next stage of his destiny, there is no way back to the last.
When a person finds himself in a state such as mine, everything around him takes on a different aspect: people seem to laugh differently, walk differently, react to you differently, and you, for that matter, react differently to them. In a word, the world and the people who walk in it appear hostile to you. I would like it not to be so, but that's how it is and now I don't know what I can do about it, apart from describe it. Somehow, I say, everything changes, which means that even the landscape around you seems to change as well." --Borivoje Adašević
A.S.Byatt's story of a lover's unusual betrayal is beautifully drawn.
August 14, 2014
"Bence herkes birbirinden farklı öpüşüyor. Bu tür öpüşmelerde her zaman ruhlar ve özgün, şahsi düşünceler de etklişim halindedir. Bedenlerin üzerindeki kafalarda ağızlar çok özel deneyimler yaşarlar; her biri her zaman kendine özgü. Ve bu nedenle bir daha asla Alfredo'nunki gibi bir öpüşme yaşayamayacağım sevgili bayan Merk. Tabii bir daha onunla karşılaşmazsam."
July 11, 2017
These are unusual stories. Absurdist, Kafkaesque in many places, or supernatural. A woman who discovers a "thing" crouching in the corner of her living room behind the TV set that only gets bigger when her husband returns from a business trip and may be cheating her her. A dishrag that announces it was a person the day before. Some of the stories are a little too confusing or obscure, but overall, this collection inspired me!
October 30, 2018
Some were quite good, some were terrible, most were in between.
February 1, 2021
ترجمه نیمی از داستان ها ضعیف است و ارتباط برقرار کردن سخت
من این داستان ها رو دوست داشتم:
موسیقی در بن استخوان
فرشتگانی در سوی درون
هجرت
و نتوانستم با باقی داستان ها ارتباطی برقرار کنم
من این داستان ها رو دوست داشتم:
موسیقی در بن استخوان
فرشتگانی در سوی درون
هجرت
و نتوانستم با باقی داستان ها ارتباطی برقرار کنم
February 2, 2014
Strange sometimes surreal tales - people trapped in a lift, people watching an absurdist play, a girl looks after a cow named Daisy... The best, for me, as always are the more realistic and "traditional" stories, where character comes first and you get behind the skin of a character in a story. There were fewer of these than I would have liked, unfortunately, so ideally I'd like to give this 2 and half stars.
February 5, 2015
Another great collection - the third that I've read in this series. I read this one slowly, a story at a time over about 6 months, and every time I came back to it I was delighted once again by the diversity of voices, settings, perspectives and themes. Even if some stories are better than others, every one is worth reading. I'm very much looking forward to the 2014 collection!
April 8, 2013
Esperando ansiosamente pelo lançamento, em outubro (Kindle). As edições anteriores proporcionaram grandes descobertas.
December 19, 2013
I found interesting around two thirds of the stories.
Want to read
September 7, 2014Ich habe ein Buch bei BookCrossing.com registriert!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12811233
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12811233
November 16, 2015
Some of the stories are superb, but many of them are light in scene and heavy in exposition.
March 5, 2016
Read about half the stories, some okay, others not so much.
September 2, 2014
It was okay... the only story that stood out was a story by A.S. Byatt.
January 5, 2018
Thank you for continuing this project. My only complaint is the change in the cover design.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews