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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good-nosed to bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblant, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Alexander Hammond. He has been living in the United States since 1992 when he was awarded a visit to America

and then war broke out in his native Sarajevo. He's stayed basically ever since, learning to speak English, to write in English, and now he's published his first book.

It's a combination of autobiography and autobiographical essays, much as some of his earlier work, particularly Nowhere Man, has been a mixture of novel and short stories.

That fractional form, why is it attractive to you?

Well, I guess I experience the world as a bunch of fragments that have to be organized in some

cogent manner, at least we

should, or I should try to organize it. All the fractures can ever be smoothed out fully.

And in fact, I believe that's where meaning comes from. The meaning arises, you know,

between, as in film, between two shots.

And so I'm, I have an instinctive resistance to smooth narratives.

There's a fascinating moment in the book, the Book of My Lives, it's published by Faris Strauss and Giroux, you talk about a teacher of yours

who taught you close reading, who forces you to see the work of literature outside of its

political context with nothing but linguistic meaning. It used to be called the new criticism.

And lo and behold, he turns out to be one of the tyrants in the revolution.

He is a torturer.

He's a killer.

...