Aleksandar Hemon is a very sneaky writer, which he's proven in works like The Lazarus Project, a story with photographs that was both true and entirely fictitious. But the best example of his guile is in his acknowledgements for The Making of Zombie Wars, where he thanks his agent for "not moving a muscle on her face when I told her I'd written a novel she'd known nothing about." The Making of Zombie Wars is an entirely different animal than Hemon's most famous works. Instead of his usual project of forcing readers to confront assumptions about the story he presents, here he forces them to confront assumptions about his overall narrative project.
Joshua Levin, a failed screenwriter and ESL teacher, begins a tryst with his married Bosnian student, which leads to a farcical series of events that grow ever more dangerous and absurd. Scenes from Josh's latest script, a horror movie called Zombie Wars, make up the chapters that don't chronicle his failures as a womanizer and functioning adult. As the novel continues, the script and Josh's life begin to merge. A neurotic Jewish writer in his 30s seems a strange protagonist for a Hemon novel, considering his life as a refugee from Bosnia permeates the rest of his work, but that may very well be the point. The Making of Zombie Wars cheekily skewers the archetypal "Jewish artist" protagonist in American literature even as it shows that Hemon has a wider range than he's ever shown before. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.