Like the protagonist of Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 The Lazarus Project and, indeed, like Hemon himself, a Bosnian-born writer famously stranded in Chicago on the eve of war in 1992 Yugoslavia, the narrator of Love and Obstacles (Riverhead, $25.95) is a man who can’t go home. Though the gods of exile literature lurk—Conrad, Nabokov—Hemon’s newest interlocking story collection is unified as much by his hero’s wildly vulgar, incisive mind as by any pervasive sense of displacement. (Note that Weds. event is at University Book Store, 7 p.m.) ZACH BARON

Tue., May 26, 7:30 p.m.; Wed., May 27, 7 p.m., 2009