Word: hemon
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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With the new anthology Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive Press; 421 pages), edited by Chicago-based writer Aleksandar Hemon, our literary world just got wider. Hemon, an award-winning author who was born in Sarajevo and did not begin writing in English until he was in his early 30s, is an excellent guide to the European sensibility. And Best European is an exhilarating read. With stories from 35 nations and regions from Albania to Wales, it's like a Eurail pass that lets you tour a continent's worth of psychological landscapes. Trying to take in all of them...
...than their American counterparts. They experiment freely with structure and venture more often down the path of metafiction, debating the direction of a story even as their characters are entangled in it. ("The Basilica in Lyon," by Serbian writer David Albahari, is a mesmerizing dream chase along those lines.) Hemon says this is a reflection partly of his own editorial taste but also of the European publishing environment, which doesn't follow the American blockbuster model. "There's a lot of American fiction on the fringes that is very daring," he says. "But it is judged not by courage...
Dalkey Archive Press hopes the 2010 edition will be the first in an annual series. That sounds good to Hemon, who says readership of foreign fiction needs to be cultivated over time. But the hunger for it is there: "There's a tradition of exceptionalism and insularity in America, but there's also a tradition of openness and interest in other parts of the world." In the book's preface, Zadie Smith writes, "I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day." Best European Fiction puts...