My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You

Reviews

Praise for My Parents/This Does Not Belong to You:

"My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You has two front covers, two title pages, two copyright pages; the halves have been placed back-to-back rather than sequentially. Like Hemon’s fiction, the real-life stories in My Parents are so exquisitely constructed that their scaffolding is invisible. You get the sense that he is trying to understand his parents in a way that his younger self did not… [it] is warm, wry and loving…. This Does Not Belong to You is rawer and stranger, focused more on Hemon than his parents, though the two halves of the book work in tandem. That these two Hemons live side by side in the same volume is a way for him to show how the act of writing allows him to “organize my interiority.” Writing about one exhausting excursion with his inexhaustible father (involving beehives, a color TV, the World Cup, and a tractor), Hemon distills their relationship into a couple of vibrant sentences, impeccably timed: “I just sat there accepting the fact that I was but a loose particle in my father’s hypercharged narrative field. Meanwhile, he was already contentedly slurping his soup.” - New York Times Book Review
 
"In this moving memoir, Hemon approaches the general through the particular, capturing the refugee experience of displacement through writing about his Bosnian family…. The chapter on food will not only have you heading to the kitchen, but laughing out loud. Describing his parents uncomfortably eating at a restaurant, Hemon gets on a roll like he’s doing stand-up …. It’s in his chapter on music, however, where Hemon eloquently articulates the beautiful sorrow of Slavic culture … When you finish My Parents, you flip the book over and start This Does Not Belong to You, a separate collection of isolated memories, musings and anecdotes. This is Hemon at his most contemplative, whimsical, and personal…. it is, like My Parents, a joy to join in the reflection." - LA Times
 
"Hemon’s gorgeous new dual memoir …. The writing contains both immediacy and a thrillingly historical long view… The stories Hemon tells about his parents and their histories are by turns harrowing and hilarious. While My Parents unrolls in great skeins of storytelling, its companion book, This Does Not Belong to You, is a series of short, spikier pieces … it’s darkly comic … This is some of the best writing about what it really feels like to be a child that I can recall reading." - Newsday
 
"Bracing candor, gruff tenderness, righteous anger, and political astuteness, all conveyed with Hemon’s signature intensity, mordant wit, and creative bite." - Booklist, starred

“An incisive combination of literature that addresses the function of literature and memories that explore the meaning of memory.” 
—Kirkus, starred review 

“Sometimes lively and sensual, sometimes bleakly ruminative, Hemon’s recollections unite his dazzling prose style with a captivating personal narrative.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“In lovely, languorous sentences, Hemon passes over nothing, and records the inner wars of his previous life.” —The Guardian

“His latest two-books-in-one memoir makes clear that a penchant for narrative — not to mention beekeeping, folk singing and righteous grievance — runs in his immigrant family.”
—The Baltimore Sun

“His latest two-books-in-one memoir makes clear that a penchant for narrative ― not to mention beekeeping, folk singing and righteous grievance ― runs in his immigrant family." ― Chicago Tribune

“Novelist Hemon brings his piercing sardonic vision to a perfectly matched dual book.” ― BBC

“Hemon continues to chronicle his family history with abundant skill and artistry.” ―A.V. Club

“A witty, mournful two-in-one memoir. In My Parents: An Introduction, Hemon explores his parents’ history and melancholy relationships to food, music, marriage and other cultural touchstones. In This Does Not Belong to You, Hemon contemplates his inheritance. In either case, the mood is anxious. To be a Hemon is to be watchful, and what you’re watching for is the other shoe dropping.” ― The Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Hemon resists, redefines and liberates his prose from genre labels by incorporating multiple forms and styles throughout each work. For Hemon, as a writer and professor, it is not about what a piece of writing “is” in a categorical sense, but rather how to employ the possibilities of language to construct complex narrative spaces.” ― New City

"Hemon the narrator makes himself vulnerable in a new way. This is the work’s ­greatest thrill.” —Literary Review of Canada
 

Praise for Aleksandar Hemon:

“Aleksandar Hemon is, quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation."
―Colum McCann

“If you've never read Aleksandar Hemon, prepare to have your worldview deepened.”
―Jonathan Safran Foer

“When Hemon's work is funny, it can make you laugh in spite of everything, and when it is sad, it's hard to stand up afterward.”
―John Jeremiah Sullivan Expand reviews