Ana Stojanoska’s literary debut, Me and Lin, Afterwards, is an antinovel, a collage composed of many fragments, an embedded narrative, a metafiction, an autofiction, and a playful work with a nod to magical realism, with a detective story thrown in. Anna Karenina, Vronsky, and Tolstoy make appearances in it. It also includes a positive and matter-of-fact portrayal of a gay character—the first in Macedonian literature. This inventive work zigzags between the narrator’s postmortem of the love triangle she was involved in and her attempt to write her first novel. The events of the love triangle are narrated out of sequence, leaving it up to the reader to fit them back together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, while the story of the narrator’s novel in progress builds to an intriguing and engaging conclusion. Ana Stojanoska is a writer who delights in experimenting with genre, form, and popular culture influences. She pushes against the boundaries of the novel form, and gives a fresh treatment to the standard love-triangle story— minus the pathos—and the novel-within-a-novel trope. Her work highlights the vibrancy and dynamism of contemporary Macedonian literature and is proof that Macedonian women writers rock.

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LITERATURE, PARODY AND DEATH

Everyone wants to know who killed Gladwell the Parodist. Everyone, that is, except Jim Tate, alias Antinous, who is far more interested in the unpublished novels Ralph Gladwell is rumoured to have left behind. The brilliant Parodist, despiser of the modern novel, whose wit could skewer any writer living or dead, could have been murdered by any one of his many victims. But who was Gladwell really, and what true face lay behind his sardonic mask? In this brisk whydunnit, the feints and fallacies of human nature are peeled back, page by page, to reveal the rage, desperation, love and vulnerability out of which literature is made…
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Ivana had gone missing… With her disappearance there begins a fantastical adventure for Professor Zoran Živković, author and teacher of creative writing. Assisted by Senior Inspector Sanja Mrvaljević of the Belgrade police, military counterintelligence, the National Security Agency and ultimately Interpol, the search for Ivana grows into a comic nightmare of unforeseen proportions. For why and how do a series of mysterious videos, in which Ivana plays the starring role, reach Professor Živković’s inbox, and why are their settings at once strangely familiar and unfamiliar? How will he escape the web of suspicion which weaves implacably about him, and will he and Ivana ever be reunited? Once again, this time in the ultimate sense, Živković explores the trickeries and mysteries of the creative process, in a book that is gripping, hilarious, touching and more revealing than any he has yet written.
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