The Question of Bruno

The Question of Bruno is a collection of stories and a novella by Aleksandar Hemon, set between Sarajevo and Chicago. The pieces are connected through recurring characters, shared locations, and substories that thread across the book. One story reimagines the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand through a brief, disorienting close-up. Another follows an exiled writer working in a Chicago sandwich shop, adjusting to the small strangeness of a new country. In another, letters sent from wartime Sarajevo describe the practical geometry of moving through a city under siege.

Hemon, who was born in Sarajevo and settled in Chicago, writes in English as a second language, and his prose carries a particular attentiveness to words and their odd behavior in unfamiliar surroundings. The book treats displacement, war, and loss with dark humor and precise physical detail rather than sentiment. Several of the stories appeared individually in publications including Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Granta, Chicago Review, The New Yorker, and The Baffler. The story titled Islands was selected for Best American Short Stories in 1999.

Across the collection, large historical events press against small private ones. The Bosnian War, early twentieth-century political violence, and the daily texture of immigrant life in the American Midwest all occupy the same pages, observed at close range and without commentary.