THE LAZARUS PROJECT

New York City, NY: Riverhead Books, 2008. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. As New/As New Dust Jacket.. New York City, NY: Riverhead Books, 2008. Hardcover. As New/As New. First Edition/First Printing. 294 pages. The author's second novel. One of Aleksandar Hemon's finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Aleksandar Hemon's "The Lazarus Project". His remarkable conflation of Past and Present, fact and fiction. As such, the novel is brilliantly interspersed with archival photographs from the Chicago Historical Society and contemporary images by Velibor Bozovic, mirroring the photographs that one of the characters, a war photographer named Rora (pronounced like "war"), always carries with him. "Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: The novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov. Beauty and violence, in Hemon's universe, are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, he seems determined not to let his readers escape the experience of war as a personal affront and a personal transformation" (David Leavitt). "She would one day die, and so would Rora, and so would I. They were me. We lived the same life: We would vanish into the same death. We were like everybody else, because there was nobody like us" (Aleksandar Hemon). An absolute "must-have" title for Aleksandar Hemon collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed and dated (shortly after publication) in black ink-pen on the title page by the author: "11/02/08 Aleksandar Hemon". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. It also comes with a copy of the elongated Souvenir Program, "The Chicago Heartland Prize", which was awarded to Hemon for "The Lazarus Project" and to Garry Wills for "What The Gospels Meant" on November 2, 2008. The Program is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the cover by both prize-winning authors. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed and post-publication dated copy (with Signed Souvenir Material) of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare signed set thus. Finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2002 for "Nowhere Man". Winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2004. Finalist of the National Book Award in 2008 for "The Lazarus Project". One of the most brilliant writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ALEKSANDAR HEMON TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1594489882.