Aleksandar Hemon

Essays pay tribute to the two different cities of the author's youth--Sarajevo, until the city came under siege, and then Chicago, where he and his family started a new life, leaving behind everything they had ever known.

The Book of My Lives

Derek Barlas

Book of essays - slow at first but really enjoyed it. Being a Bosnian, there was lots of content on the Bosnian War.

Stephen Schenkenberg

Love this scene-setting opening to "The Lives of Grandmasters":

I do not know how old I was when I learned to play chess. I could not have been older than eight, because I still have a chessboard on whose side my father inscribed, with a soldering iron, “Saša Hemon 1972.” I loved the board more than chess — it was one of the first things I owned. Its materiality was enchanting to me: the smell of burnt wood that lingered long after my father had branded it; the rattle of the thickly varnished pieces inside, the smacking sound they made when I put them down, the board’s hollow wooden echo. I can even recall the taste — the queen’s tip was pleasantly suckable; the pawns’ round heads, not unlike nipples, were sweet. The board is still at our place in Sarajevo, and, even if I haven’t played a game on it in decades, it is still my most cherished possession, providing incontrovertible evidence that there once lived a boy who used to be me.

The Book of My Lives

Reviews