“It is the perfect moment,” Aleksandar Hemon said in his sonorous voice when I asked if it was a good time for our interview. Born in Sarajevo, the novelist came to the United States just prior the Bosnian war, took up residence in Chicago, and swiftly colonised the English language for his own artistic purposes.

His latest novel, The Making of Zombie Wars, was published in the United States on Tuesday. It relates the travails of a somewhat wilted aspiring screenwriter named Joshua Levin, who, like many of Hemon’s characters, teaches English as a second language in Chicago to make ends meet. Seduced by a married student, Levin must negotiate the student’s terrifying husband, his own girlfriend and his PTSD-ridden landlord, in addition to his questionable creative efforts as a screenwriter. The novel originated as a counterfactual history; 20 years ago when Hemon himself worked as an ESL teacher, an attractive (married) student made a pass at him. He declined the offer “because I strive to be decent, sadly”.

All of Hemon’s novels employ frame narratives – complex forms of scaffolding that hold up a story – of varying style and efficacy. His first novel, Nowhere Man, is the story of a person displaced across space, time, and narrative. His second novel, The Lazarus Project, which has been called his “Abu Ghraib novel”, is both a buddy road trip and historical investigation into state violence. Zombie Wars is constructed around Joshua’s screenplay in progress, a zombie film filled with all the expected blood and viscera. The effect of Hemon’s narrative architecture is always original and always strange. James Wood memorably described Hemon as a “postmodernist who has been mugged by history” in a 2008 review in the New Yorker.

Hemon didn’t do any new research into the zombie genre despite writing during what he calls a “zombie renaissance” in American culture: “I didn’t want to write a book about zombies; I wanted to write a book about someone who has creative fantasies about zombies. It was OK for Joshua to come up with clichés, as long as I wasn’t coming up with them.”

As it turns out, Hemon doesn’t even watch The Walking Dead, although its grotesqueries and brand of cliché haunt Levin’s script. But he has views on why Americans are so obsessed with zombies, particularly post-9/11: “The zombie trope was deployed at times throughout this country’s history to deal with its anxieties.” And America, Hemon says, “believes in violence deeply on the political level – when in doubt, invade a fucking country”. On the individual level, “the people who believe in guns really believe that if they are deprived of access to violence, they are deprived of civic agency”. Chicago, specifically, is a place where violence is being played out every day. “I do not love that conflict,” Hemon says, “but it is also morally and intellectually stimulating.” Hemon’s conversation naturally drifts toward politics. Eventually we are on to the “scam of American capitalism”.

“This is a rant now,” Hemon says ruefully. “I usually slip into rants.”

Violence is central to much of Hemon’s work – both the specific violence endured or enacted by people who survived the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995, and the more general violent tendencies, including his own, of men who are “formulated and formed in a society that pushes them toward violence”.

This makes his writing sound unbearably grim – it’s not. Hemon is remarkable for his playful, loving and endlessly generative relationship with language, even when it is deployed on painful topics. In Zombie Wars, a cat looking out a window finds a street “where leafless tree crowns scrambled the morning light, where bicycles with training wheels lingered on the porches, Andersonville dreaming itself up”. But he always betrays readers who are beguiled by the beauty of sentences into cosiness. (This reader will never trust him after the last line of Szmura’s Room, an extraordinary short story from among a corpus of extraordinary short stories: “He was folding the photo to put it in his pocket when Szmura charged across the room, leaping over the bed, and blew Bogdan’s left eye right out of the socket with his first punch.”)

The sinister tones in Hemon’s work often have a deliberately comic edge. For him, this too is political. He tells me that humour is a form of currency in places where citizens have “reduced agency in the face of state violence and history”. He has a favourite anecdote about this, of a starving family staring at a lone, scraggly potato that served, in the absence of television, as a source of entertainment during the siege of Sarajevo.

Hemon’s work often portrays his native city as a site of cosmopolitanism and plurality before the war. He warns both against teleology – the tendency to find the inevitability of a historical moment in all its preceding moments – on one hand, and nostalgia on the other, citing America as an analogue: “Suppose that sometime in the future, God forbid, there was an actual armed racial conflict in this country. Someone might say it’s been going on for hundreds of years and yes, there has been that continuity. But simultaneously there is a continuity of contrary discourse and activism, of people who fought against racism and the power structures that enforce it and reproduce it. To say that it’s one way or the other simplifies them in a way that is deeply ideological.”

If there is any hope for pluralism and cosmopolitanism, though, Hemon believes it lies in the cities. And in literature, which works best “when it’s a field that covers a lot of ground, a lot of experience”. We are fortunate, Hemon says, to see a moment when the canon of white male authors is being challenged due largely to “an influx of people from other parts of the world into the language – look at any of those writers under 40 in the New Yorker or in Granta. Of course, you’ll see some white men, and God bless them; it’s OK as long as they’re not the only ones.”

His own upcoming projects include a kind of travelogue on the United Nations to be released in October, and a group of planned essays on Nabokov (to whom he has often been compared) based on lectures Hemon delivered during a residency at the University of North Texas. Fiction is on the back burner for the moment. “I don’t like to write new fiction while this book is not fully actualised,” Hemon said. An actualised book is one that has made its way to its readers. “Then I am released from my bonds with the book and I can move on to the next one.” It’s the perfect moment, I think.