Alta Ifland grew up in Eastern Europe and immigrated to the States in 1991. Her bilingual (French-English) book of prose poems, Voice of Ice, was awarded the 2008 Louis Guillaume Prize for Prose Poems. Her collection of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World, is forthcoming from ninebark press. Her story, "No One's Story," was looked at earlier today here at the EWN.
The Question of Bruno
by Bosnian-born writer Aleksandar Hemon is one of 
the best short story
collections I read in a long time.
Besides the fact that it is very well written and very funny, it uses a
Balzacian technique (that is, a technique invented by Balzac in the cycle La Comédie Humaine, in which a story
from one book complements another book’s events, and a character from one
book/story makes a brief appearance in another book/story). For example, Josef Pronek from “Blind Josef
Pronek and Dead Souls” is also the main character in most of the pieces
published two years after The Question
of Bruno under the title Nowhere Man, with the subtitle “The
Pronek Fantasies.”
Some of the stories in The
Question of Bruno have Hemon as a character. In “Exchange of Pleasant Words,” we are
basically given a mythical version of the origin of Hemon’s family—indeed, a
myth of origin: an Alexandre Hemon from France supposedly ended up in Ukraine as he retreated with Napoleon's army, and from there, the family immigrated to Bosnia. “Nursed out of his glacial numbness” by a
Ukrainian woman, he marries her, and they both become “the Adam and Eve of the
Hemon universe.”
Hemon’s two main characters, Pronek and Hemon, actually
cross paths and meet in the story “Blind Josef and Dead Souls.” The same thing happens with other characters
from the book, for example Sorge from “The Sorge Spy Ring,” a spy the narrator
has read about as a child in The Greatest
Spies of World War Two, who reappears in the book’s last story, “Imitation
of Life,” as well as in the novel Nowhere
Man. The separate universes of the
various stories are thus united into one encompassing, lifelike world.
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