American Sfumato consists of nine mesmerizing stories, each designed to function independently and form a unit with the rest. The action is set in several present-time locales (Chicago, the Balkans, New Orleans, Germany, Brazil), and the narrative revolves around a protagonist who's caught up in attempts to reassemble the fragments that constitute his life. By day, he's a neurobiologist who researches learning and memory, which then informs his acts of night-time self-examination.

The Serbo-Croatian version was published in Montenegro and Serbia in 2015, and a Slovenian translation was released in 2016. In 2016, American Sfumato was nominated for the Mesa Selimovic Prize, the most prestigious award for a novel published in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, or Serbia, and in 2017, it was shortlisted as a Montenegrin entry for the European Union Prize for Literature.

“Vojislav Pejović dissects a mind in displacement and converts it into poetry rendered in meticulously thoughtful prose. American Sfumato is loaded with experience, energized by writing that is beautiful, precise and generous. You’ll be carrying this book around, so that you can return to it at moments of pain and joy, or read it aloud to the ones you love.” – Aleksandar Hemon, National Book Award finalist, author of The Lazarus Project

“A heady, vertiginous series of stories that invent their own chronology as they trace a life across wars and continents and love affairs.” – Eula Biss, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, author of On Immunity

“Dreamy and brutal, sensuous and strange, the nine-story novel that is American Sfumato looks out at the world with wide, steady eyes, taking in sex and war and the uncertain paths of the migrant without flinching.” – Joshua Corey, author of Hannah and the Master

“This book was a cold beer in a steamy banya followed by a jump in an icy lake, leaving me spent but more alive. It was an airlock from which I was absolutely unwilling to emerge.” – Brigid Pasulka, author of The Sun and Other Stars