Aleksandar Hemon biography

Interview

The Lazarus Project is Aleksandar Hemon's third work of fiction, but the first intended as a novel. In it he tackles some tough questions about the life of immigrants in the US. In this interview he discusses what led him to this story, and the resources he drew on to write it.

This is your third work of fiction, but the first one that was conceived and intended as a novel. Was this simply a natural progression in your work, or was it a challenge that you consciously set for yourself?
Well, Nowhere Man was elected a novel. On the cover of the Nowhere Man hardback there was no description of the book - I talked my editor into omitting it. The book was neither a novel nor a short story collection. But then everyone reviewed it as a novel and it came out in paperback as a novel and I guess it is a novel now.

As for The Lazarus Project, for the longest time I called it simply “the big book.” I could not, and would not, refer to it as “a novel” until I submitted it to my editor, so it became something I could describe as a novel very late in its production. It is pretty weird, I think, to set out to write a novel - unless it merely means a lot of pages - because that implies that one is simply writing down what has already been thought up and imagined, that the form precedes the work; I don’t know how to do that. I had no idea what would come out when I started writing The Lazarus Project, except that it would not be a short story. Then one day I just recognized it as a novel, it ...