About Love and Obstacles

Aleksandar Hemon earned his reputation with his short stories, and he returns to the form with a powerful book of linked stories that stands with the award-winning novel The Lazarus Project as the best work of his career.

Infused with the astonishingly creative prose and the haunting yet hilarious storytelling that makes Hemon’s work so distinctive, the stories of Love and Obstacles are united by their narrator, a young man coming of age in communist-but-cosmopolitan Sarajevo who will leave for the United States just as his city is torn asunder. In Hemon's hands, seemingly mundane childhood experiences become daring, dramatic adventures, while unique and wrenching circumstances become common ground that involves us all.

Hemon is not simply recounting an immigrant’s autobiography. Each story spins out in fabulist, exhilarating directions, yet still builds to a dazzling and insightful, sometimes heartbreaking conclusion; each story makes the world look new again. And as the stories grow together, Love and Obstacles shows itself to be as cohesive and impressive as any novel—and always charming, and inviting, and achingly human.