Today we have the exclusive opportunity to present readers the first chapter to a forthcoming book from one of my favorite writers. Serbian author Zoran Zivkovic is a former World Fantasy Award winner (1993 for The Library), win Isidora Sekulic honors (for The Bridge in 2007), and the recipient of the Stefan Mitrov Ljubisa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2007. He has also twice been a finalist for the Yugoslavian NIN Award and International Dublin Literary Award. He has written novels and stories that don’t invite the question “Fantasic or Literary ?” they exist firmly as prime examples of both – as novels like Hidden Camera and The Fourth Circle or mosaics like Seven Touches of Music attest to. Last year, Matt Denault interviewed Zivkovic for BookSpotCentral. We also have reviews of Seven Touches of Music, The Fourth Circle and Steps Through the Mist.
Today we present to a look at Impossible Encounters to be published by AIO in January 2009. Here is the synopsis:
“A nuanced mix of the ordinary with the surreal, the mundane with the sublime, this mosaic novel quietly twists trusted concepts. With simple yet fine prose, this story unfolds as a series of otherworldly meetings. After death, a man encounters not a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, but a hall of portraits and, locked in a room, the most extraordinary artwork of all. Other colorful characters include a young man who finds himself atop a mountain, a bookseller that services the most ordinary of requests from a highly unusual patron, a banker who meets his maker on a train, a priest who receives absolution from the devil, and a dying author who finds hope in the most unlikely of conversations. Long before the last page, readers may find the world has been turned inside out.”
We usually present the text on our site, but today upon request we bring a PDF of the latest from one of the best:
We’d like to thank AIO Publishing and Mr. Zivkovic for choosing BookSpotCentral as a venue to present this exclusive look. Be on the lookout for Impossible Encounters this Autumn from AIO – anybody who has any book from AIO knows that from a content and physical aesthetic vantage point their books are nothing but quality, nothing is haphazard, and is art treated as art.
Enjoy!
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A truly unique author whose work bends trusted concepts in a seductively ordinary manner, Zoran Živković has been compared to such luminaries as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, and Stanislew Lem. His work has been broadcast on BBC radio, produced for television, optioned for film, and published in 17 countries; by the end of 2008 three more countries will have joined that list. He has been nominated for several awards and received the World Fantasy Award in 2003, the Miloš Crnjanski Award in 1994, the Isidora Sekulić Award in 2006, and the Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša Award in 2007. In 2007 he was named Guest of Honor at EuroCon in Copenhagen, Denmark. His mosaic novels Seven Touches of Music and Steps Through the Mist appeared in the United States and Canada in 2006 and 2007.
