Saturday, November 2, 8 PM: Two 30-ish men near the bar at TBA Exhibition Space in River North tipped their plastic shot glasses of Scotch toward each other. “To, uh, literature,” said one. “Yeah,” said the other, and they drank up.
Hemon’s previous book, The Question of Bruno, a collection of short stories and a novella, came out in 2000. Before that, he was an unknown, a Bosnian writer and editor who’d come to the U.S. on a cultural exchange and got stuck in Chicago when war broke out in 1992. He’d taught himself English while working a series of low-wage jobs, shivering through the winters in an Uptown apartment. After Bruno was published (also by Nan A. Talese) he was compared to Nabokov by the New York Times and Conrad by the New Yorker. Now he’s a star–or as big a star as a writer can be in Chicago without being Scott Turow. Bruno was eventually published in 18 countries and won several literary awards, and in the last two years Hemon’s fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, and the Paris Review. Nowhere Man elaborates on the novella from Bruno, about Jozef Pronek, a young Sarajevan who visits the U.S. and gets stuck in Chicago when war breaks out in Bosnia.
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Reed cooked up a guest list of 60 writers, publishers, editors, and assorted local notables, including Alex Kotlowitz, Ira Glass, and Studs Terkel. (Terkel couldn’t make it–he was accepting an award at the Chicago Humanities Festival–and neither could Glass, who was covering the ceremony.) He got Thomas Blackman Associates to let him use the gallery space for free, corralled artists to hang their work on the walls, and promoted the event to the general public as well as industry types. Doubleday kicked in some money for the booze, and Reed covered the remaining costs out of pocket.
But reading from a later section, in which Pronek meets the Chicago woman he’ll fall in love with, Hemon and Crane established a brisk rhythm.
Hemon: “Listened to them.”
Five minutes later it was over. There was clapping, and then the smokers drifted back to the window and the drinkers headed for the bar.
