Monthly Archives: May 2016

The Compendium of the Dead :: Zoran Živković

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The Compendium of the Dead

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Vuk Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


THE FINAL PART OF THE PAPYRUS TRILOGY
When certain mysterious events involving books occur, it seems that Inspector Dejan Lukić is always the man for the job. This time, however, things are a little different. Inspector Lukić himself is at the heart of the mystery, lured by the appearance of a number of packages addressed to him in person and left at several highly unlikely locations. The contents of these packages – a set of books known as The Compendium of the Dead – a series of bizarre disappearances and a succession of strange encounters keep the baffled Inspector on his toes right up until the extraordinary dénouement, in which the finality of death itself is challenged. In this, the final part of the trilogy that began with The Last Book and The Grand Manuscript, Zoran Živković demonstrates beyond contradiction the magical and ultimately benevolent power of literature.

Included in The Papyrus Trilogy.

Reviews

  • This third variation on powerful books (and the power behind them) allows Živković to bring the trilogy almost full-circle, and tie up some loose ends in setting everything right — the havoc that a writer wreaks put back in order. It’s a decent, clever idea, and certainly makes for an agreeable conclusion. … The Papyrus Trilogy forms a nicely rounded whole.
    —Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review
  • Zoran Živković is more interested in books and how they are made than in hard-boiled detectives and how they detect. Not for everyone perhaps, but good fun…
    —David Cozy, Only A Blockhead

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The Grand Manuscript :: Zoran Živković

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The Grand Manuscript

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


THE SECOND PART OF THE PAPYRUS TRILOGY
An empty apartment, locked from the inside: this is the mystery that literature-loving police inspector Dejan Lukić, hero of Zoran Živković’s The Last Book, is called in to solve. What has become of the woman who lives there, bestselling detective fiction writer Jelena Jakovljević? And, perhaps more importantly still, what has happened to the manuscript of her newly-completed novel, Find Me? As Inspector Lukić becomes ever more entangled in the growing mystery, a highly-strung literary agent, a blind painter, a virtuoso lock-picker and various cutthroat publishers all have their part to play in an elaborate game of misdirection and pursuit. Not to mention the dark powers of the National Security Agency and a secret cult seeking the key to immortality. Once again, Inspector Lukić stands at the heart of a literary conundrum only he can solve and through which he stands to gain—or lose—everything.

Included in The Papyrus Trilogy.

Reviews

  • It begins with him being called to a writer’s apartment by her desperate literary agent, who fears the worst. At the writer’s apartment they find the door locked—from the inside—but no one answering. Lukić inexplicably finds no trace of the author—a classic locked-door mystery. … Appearances—and their absence (such the pseudonymous missing author)—are nicely constantly deceiving here, making for an enjoyable enough read.
    —Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review
  • Once again Živković’s bookish world is fantastic. But then books can endow their characters with immortality, so maybe it’s not as fantastic as all that. Like the first book in the trilogy, this book can stand on its own, but it is inextricably connected to the first, and some of the philosophical fun will only be apparent to those who’ve read both.
    —David Cozy, Only A Blockhead

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The Last Book :: Zoran Živković

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The Last Book

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


THE FIRST PART OF THE PAPYRUS TRILOGY
A series of mysterious deaths in the Papyrus Bookstore brings literature-loving police inspector Dejan Lukić to investigate. Here he meets the attractive owner, Vera Gavrilović, and learns that the only thing the victims have in common is that in the moments before their deaths they were reading an elusive and unidentified volume — The Last Book.
As the plot thickens and the seemingly causeless deaths multiply, the National Security Agency, a secret apocalyptic sect and an exotic teashop become involved, while Dejan and Vera’s growing attachment is threatened by nightmares and ever-encroaching danger. Is a literary madman on the loose, murdering readers according to the method laid down in The Name of the Rose?
In a final race against time, Inspector Lukić must discover the secret of The Last Book and the reason why he feels as though he has already read everything that is happening to him in a novel. The extraordinary denouement reveals hidden truths about the clash of realities and the awesome power of the creative imagination.

Included in The Papyrus Trilogy.

Reviews

  • The resolution shouldn’t surprise readers familiar with Živković’s work, but even those that are should find the anything-but-typical thriller denouement a nice twist. … Živković knows what he’s doing, and he does it well here.
    —Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review
  • The plot twists and turns at a fairly brisk pace and every hint of predictability is brushed aside nonchalantly after every successive chapter. It is as though Živković wants to issue a whodunit challenge to the user at every possible instance. Every clue, and red herring, is subtly sown into the plot…
    — Pushpak Karnick, Epic India
  • Serbian master fantasist Živković has written what may be the most delicious mystery by a speculative-fiction specialist since Stanislaw Lem’s mind-boggling The Investigation. Unlike Lem’s novel, it is also a discreet, witty love story.
    —Ray Olson, Booklist
  • In an unnamed, colourless east European state, Inspector Dejan Lukić is called in to investigate a death at the Papyrus Bookstore. The problem is that there seems to be no obvious cause of death. What starts as a commonplace detective story undergoes a slow transformation as Lukic’s dreams lead him to an enigmatic dénouement. Fans of Živković’s stripped-down, elliptical fables will be delighted by this elusive metafiction…
    —Eric Brown, The Guardian

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The Writer & The Ghostwriter :: Zoran Živković

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The Writer & The Ghostwriter

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


The Writer: A Very Short Novel, without Chapters, about Writing and Darkness
Where does all the writing come from? Is it divine inspiration, a bolt of lightning that reveals a whole new work in a single glimpse, or a unique gift granted by demonic forces to penetrate the darkness and see beyond it? Two fundamental principles of the most noble of all arts are in the permanent collision, surrounded by the contagious environment of the authors’ vanity, envy, malice.

The Ghostwriter
A writer sits down to work, but who can resist the addictive temptation of the email inbox? Each message alert brings a new question and a fresh challenge, until a tangled web weaves its way around the hapless author. Yet all the while his cat, Felix, gets on with life regardless. Zoran Zivkovic’s hilarious new novella lays bare the oddities and absurdities of the writing life: the traps writers set for themselves and the snares readers lay for them. Here, too, are fascinating puzzles about the nature of authorship and the writer’s identity, the relationship between the writer and their work and between the writer and the reader, the reader and that which is read. Above all, though, it is a paean to the Cat, to a relationship which in its simplicity and innocence, its playfulness and affection, makes nonsense of all these human perplexities.

Reviews

  • In The Ghostwriter, [the protagonist] is juggling email exchanges with five different people, some entirely anonymous, some known to him in different capacities. What the email exchanges share is exploration of the idea of writing under a pseudonym. … The back and forth between Felix and his pushy correspondents, with their different demands and suggestions, is quite amusing, and allows for an interesting exploration of the question of authorship and attribution. Admirably, too, the five very different variations on the theme are brought quite nicely together: as usual, Živković is very good with the final knot tying his stories together.
    —Michael Orthofer, Complete Review
  • The fact that you are reading a story about a science fiction writer written by a science fiction writer is the kind of metafictional “mind-game” the writer of The Writer likes to play. The depiction of an “unreality”—or, in many cases, multiple “unrealities”—raises complex questions about existence that do not lead to clear answers.
    —David Soyka, The New York Review of Science Fiction
  • As might be expected of a European academic trained in literary theory, Živković mingles postmodern flourishes—self-reflexivity, deconstructionist ruminations—with the materials of speculative fiction. Overall, he perhaps most strongly resembles Italo Calvino in the latter’s fantastic vein. Surrealism, incongruous introspection, teasing narrative geometries, and startling systems of hyperbolic wit shape and illuminate his yarns, lending them an Escheresque elegance… a surrealist tour de force.
    —Nick Gevers, Locus

Details

  • Pages: 144
  • Trim size
    Hardcover: 5″ x 8″ (127mm x 203mm), with dj
    Softcover: Hardcover: 5″ x 8″ (127mm x 203mm)
  • ISBN
    Hardcover: 978-4-908793-02-8
    Softcover: 978-4-908793-24-0
    Ebook: 978-4-908793-34-9
  • List Price
    Hardcover: US$20.00
    Softcover: US$9.00
    Ebook: US$5.99
  • Cover: Youchan Ito （Togoru Art Works）
  • Download sellsheet (PDF)

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Escher’s Loops :: Zoran Živković

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Escher’s Loops

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


Once again Zivkovic demonstrates the sheer power of storytelling in this complex cycle of interlocking narratives. Like one of Escher’s drawings, the narrative threads lead one through a dizzying labyrinth of recurring themes, images and characters, all of whom are linked with elegant mathematical precision: God and suicide, food and poison, monks, athletes, soldiers and soccer players all take their places in the circle-dance. Absurdity, surreality and humor abound; death is the ultimate destiny, yet always the next story offers infinite ways of escape.

Reviews

  • …a delightful journey through the ‘degrees of separation’ that connect us together. It is a story without place and time, yet timeless in its message; and though the characters are nameless, they are at once universal in their appeal and intimately familiar due to their idiosyncrasies. Escher’s Loops is a hard and honest look into one’s personal mirror.
    —Pushpak Karnick, Epic India

Details

  • Pages: 354
  • Trim size
    Hardcover: 5″ x 8″ (127mm x 203mm), with dj
    Softcover: 5″ x 8″ (127mm x 203mm)
  • ISBN
    Hardcover: 978-4-908793-03-5
    Softcover: 978-4-908793-23-3
    Ebook: 978-4-908793-33-2
  • List price
    Hardcover: US$25.00
    Softcover: US$14.00
    Ebook: US$6.99
  • Cover: Youchan Ito （Togoru Art Works）

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Amarcord :: Zoran Živković

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Amarcord

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


Ten linked stories with resonant titles explore almost every conceivable aspect of human memory: the positive and the negative, the precious and the profane, the heavenly and the unbearably hellish. Zivkovic’s deceptively simple tales anatomize the essence of what makes human beings tick, our passions, our vanities and yearnings; the very memories which make us who we are.

Also included in Impossible Stories II.

Reviews

  • This sequence of ten brief stories each deals with an aspect of memory. Naming each story after a novel was a rather neat trick, as it creates a kind of memory short-circuit in the mind of the reader, where part of the brain is trying to overlay the story with the plot of the original novel. The two have little in common, though, and the result is to unsettle the memory while you read stories of unsettled memories. .
    —The Fiction Desk

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Miss Tamara, the Reader :: Zoran Živković

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Miss Tamara, the Reader

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


In this suite of eight stories, the three ages of woman—youth, midlife and senescence—engage in a complex and fruitful dance. A young Miss Tamara is lured by a series of postcards concealed in library books. A middle-aged Miss Tamara discovers that her new reading glasses turn the pages blank. An afternoon’s reading is disturbed by the realisation that all books have turned fatally toxic. A mysterious phone call leads to a book which blinds its readers but also to romance. Woven through these seemingly simple narratives are deep themes of youth and ageing, memory and loss, solitude and companionship, and the relationship between the physical and the mental life. Above all this is a book about reading: its pleasures, rituals, essential preciousness. Reading as an obsession which can not only isolate, but also lead to discovery and love.

Also included in Impossible Stories II.

Reviews

  • …there’s usually a strange premise in each piece that tends to be minutely bizarre that makes it inconspicuously believable but definitely tickling one’s sense of wonder. What’s interesting with this suite is that each story features what seems to be a parallel-world Miss Tamara as the events of the preceding piece has no bearing on the next… until we read the culminating story “Fruit Salad” wherein Živković ties up the mosaic.
    —Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker
  • Award-winning Serbian author Živković explores the concepts that make up the building blocks of literature, reading and writing. …eight interconnected vignettes focusing on how books, fruit and men play parts in the life of bibliophile Miss Tamara.
    —Publishers Weekly

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Impossible Stories II :: Zoran Živković

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Impossible Stories II

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić

Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


Zoran Živković’s second collection, bringing together a new set of fantastic, enthralling stories to delight you. Contains Four Stories Till the End, Twelve Collections, The Bridge, Amarcord, and Miss Tamara, the Reader.

Reviews

  • Živković masterfully filters memory and art through absurdism in this limited edition collection. …the collection, which neither has nor needs mainstream appeal; fans of Zivkovic’s unclassifiable quirkiness will quickly snap [it] up…
    —Publishers Weekly
  • …an elegant, perhaps even joyful, meditation on the existentialist’s main concern: if darkness shrouds the past, and darkness lies ahead, then what is the best response to this brief interval of light? Živković’s characters–all of whom with one exception have chosen, as the poet George Oppen wrote, “the meaning of being singular”–face their exits with curiosity and courtesy…
    —Anil Menon, Strange Horizons
  • The stories are consistently humorous yet concerned with a fairly grave subject, the afterlife. Only Peter S. Beagle’s work dazzles like Zivkovic’s.
    —Ray Olson, Booklist
  • Zivkovic rarely hits a wrong note or has a false step in the course of telling these stories, illustrating perhaps that sometimes a well-told tale just might still be one of the most effective ways of communication around.
    —Larry Holmes, Blog of the Fallen

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The Bridge :: Zoran Živković

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The Bridge

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


What is the link between red hair, a red bowling ball and a red bikini? Between an overcoat with asymmetrical lapels, a scarf with two blotches and a pair of non-matching sneakers? In this brainteasing trio of stories, Zoran Živković explores the collision of realities: a man encounters an alternate self, a woman out on a shopping trip runs into her dead neighbor and a fourteen-year-old girl chases her seventeen-year-old future son across town. Through absurd predicament, surreal situations and hot pursuit, Živković addresses deep and ultimately poignant questions of fate and chance, the vagaries of human character and the hidden potential which lies within us all.

Winner of the 2007 Isidora Sekulić Award
Winner of the Golden Hit Liber Award (given by Serbian National Television to the most prominent prose book published in 2007)
Shortlisted for the 2007 NIN Award

Also included in Impossible Stories II.

Reviews

  • …this is more than a simple concept story. It’s rich and can be read on multiple levels. The so-called bridge appears multiple times, whether literally or metaphorically. The three disparate stories are also interlinked and keen readers will spot the clues and the details which kindles one’s sense of wonder…
    —Charles Tan, Bibliophile Stalker
  • …an exercise in puzzlement. It is a series of three linked stories; each story having a beginning, a middle, and an end. The stories are individually and collectively surreal, with a sense of randomness that wanders between the profound and the comedic, the implausible and the impossible.
    ‐Karen Burnham, Bookblips

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Twelve Collections :: Zoran Živković

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Twelve Collections

by Zoran Živković

Translated from Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić
Part of The Zoran Živković Collection


What lies behind the human urge to collect things? What is the true psychology of the kleptomaniac? These questions bear on all of us; within every person there lurks a fanatical philatelist or a monomaniacal lepidopterist, just waiting to burst forth. In his new story cycle, Twelve Collections, Zoran Zivkovic, the master of mind-bending surreal fantasy, applies his fertile mind to this problem. Some of Zivkovic’s characters are lonely eccentrics, driven to gather unusual objects by quirks of temperament or fate; others are the victims of metaphysical collectors from Beyond, entities eager to snap up memories, emotions, and other loose fragments of the soul.

In these pages are explained the profound karmic consequences of photographic narcissism, insane record-keeping, the archiving of one’s nail clippings, and the infinite savouring of words; here also are exemplary warnings against surrendering hope, living without creativity, accepting too blithe a Heaven, and answering the phone in the middle of a dream-haunted night. Of course, even with such sage counsel, life remains uncertain and perilous; but even if ultimate answers can never be found, a Zivkovic collection is always eminently collectable…

Finalist in the novella category for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award
Longlisted for the 2008 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novella
A five-part TV series, “The Collector,” produced in 2005 by the Belgrade-based Studio B Television, is based on this book.

Also included in Impossible Stories II.

Reviews

  • …characters living on the extreme margins, whose bizarre and obsessive behaviour crystallises deep truths for us. …each tale is a gem of ironic humour and, as always, Živković redeems everything at the eleventh hour with a climax of revelatory beauty. The short novella at the end of this collection, The Teashop, is a delightful bonus, a sort of distillation of the storytelling principle honed throughout the previous four books: endless storytelling as a form of redemption, even, for its protagonists, as a kind of immortality.
    —Tamar Yellin, Infinity Plus
  • …an amazing reading experience. …Each of these twelve stories comes together as a cohesive whole creating a wondrous and spectacular novella that will leave you breathless by the final tale.
    [The Teashop is] an inspiring tale that touches on the magic of storytelling and the far-reaching lines of fate’s web. …the perfect conclusion to a book filled with miracles and curiosities.
    —Joe Kroeger, Horrorworld
  • The crystalline prose of suite and stand-alone alike makes the stories exquisite to read.
    —Ray Olson, Booklist

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