Aleksandar Hemon Reads Tonight @ Elliott Bay Book Co.

In five years, Aleksandar Hemon will most likely be solidly confirmed as one of America's top authors. Really, he already is, but these things take time to cement, which is perhaps another way of saying that you should go see him tonight at Elliott Bay Book Co. (100 S. Main St, 7:30 p.m.), because a couple years down the road it's going to be at a much bigger venue and not free to see Hemon speak.

Born in Sarajevo, Hemon was in the U.S. when the siege began in 1992 and was unable to return. After years of writing short stories, he exploded last year with The Lazarus Project, his first novel. The story counterpoints the 1908 murder of a Bosnian Jew in Chicago and its aftermath with the story of contemporary researchers struggling to make sense of the crime. But that's a rough explanation; the power of Hemon's novel stems from the complex set of interrelationships between past and present, Europe's bloody history, and the struggles of immigrants in the U.S.

Since then, Hemon has become a sort of cultural translator for the U.S., working to present the complex problems of Eastern Europe in a meaningful way to American readers. He's contributed to the New York Times op-ed page to try to explain Radavan Kardzic, and it was recently announced that he's editing the first edition of a new series of European literature from Dalkey Archive Press.

Tonight, Hemon's reading from his new collection of linked short stories, Love & Obstacles.