The Fourth Circle Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Mary Popović

What could a computer wizard self-exiled in an abandoned Buddhist temple possibly have in common with the humble servant of a medieval fresco painter? What is the link between the enigmatic mission of a giant radio-telescope and a tribe of spherical beings who dwell in a world full of unearthly scents and herbs? What will bring four great scientists from various centuries, Archimedes, Ludolph van Ceulen, Nikola Tesla and Stephen Hawking, to the same spot in time? What has this got to do with Rama, a female computer program, impregnated by a strange ape? And, above all, why is it necessary for Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty to join forces so that the Fourth Circle can finally be closed?

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

Time Gifts Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

A mysterious visitor comes to see three desperate human beings: an astronomer in his prison cell the night before his execution for the ultimate heresy; a paleolinguist with a wasted life behind her who has been forgotten by everybody in her dusty basement office; an old watchmaker with a dark, painful spot in his past that has haunted him for decades. The visitor has a unique but ambiguous time-gift for each one of them. His true identity is only known by an insane artist locked up in her asylum atelier. But who would believe an artist in this world, even if she were not insane?

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories I, featuring the cover design of Seven Touches of Music redone in black.

The Book Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Aleksandar B. Nedeljković

The Book is not quite a novel, although almost half of it takes the form of a narrative, neither is it an essay, although quite a lot of what is said in it adopts that style. It is actually closest to that rare type or “para-genre” of satirical prose embodied in the exemplary In Praise of Folly by the famous humanist from Rotterdam. Instead of the “Folly,” of human manias and absurdities, here, in a similar kind of double-talk, the books themselves “speak,” those monuments to our intelligence, ambitions and self-importance, and they primarily “speak” by making an analogy between man’s fate and that of books—to man’s detriment, of course.

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

Impossible Encounters Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

Six strangely related stories about six encounters that could or should have never happened. A post mortem encounter with a clerk who has a most bizarre offer; an elusive encounter with oneself, only decades older; a seemingly innocent encounter with a bookshop visitor who is desperately looking for an ordinary SF story; a memorable encounter with God in a train which, unfortunately, has to be forgotten; a dreamlike encounter with Devil in a Church as a first step on a road which doesn’t lead to Hell; finally, a forbidden encounter of a dying author with one of his protagonists who brings an impossible book as a gift.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories I, featuring the cover design of Seven Touches of Music redone in black.

Impossible Encounters Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

One of the most beloved “mosaic novels,” The Library presents a series of tales centered on our love of books—taken, at times, to extremes. A writer encounters a website where all his possible future books are on display; a lonely man faces an infinite flow of hardback books through his mailbox; an ordinary library turns by night into an archive of souls; the Devil sets about raising standards of infernal literacy; one book houses all books; a connoisseur of hardcovers strives to expel a lone paperback from his collection.

Winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella!

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories I, featuring the cover design of Seven Touches of Music redone in black.

Steps Through the Mist Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

Five women of various ages face, each in her own way, what seems to be the deterministic trap of Fate: a freshman in a girls’ boarding school with the strange ability to share other people’s dreams; a young woman in a straitjacket, desperately trying to locate a very particular future; a middle-aged skier refusing to be just a puppet on a string; an elderly fortune-teller with insufficient faith in her own trade; finally, an old lady whose very precious alarm clock is suddenly broken. And engulfing all of them, a strange mist through which no-one can see clearly…

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories I, featuring the cover design of Seven Touches of Music redone in black.

Compartments Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

On a strange train journey, in a series of six compartments, a traveller experiences unpredictable encounters, culminating in a meeting of epiphanic power. Through a narrative of dreamlike sharpness Compartments taps into the fears and absurdities, the beauties and mysteries of the unconscious mind, to achieve a consummation both moving and full of hope.

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

Four Stories Till the End Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

In what strange edifice of the imagination do you find a condemned cell, a hotel room and a hospital room? What kind of hotel offers a zinc mine, a meat-packing plant, a weapons factory and a cemetery of famous artists among its attractions? Why do four people commit suicide in the same bathroom and why does a literature professor cut up several of the greatest works of literature into a confetti of letters? In this wildly imaginative, wildly funny satire on Art and Death nothing is quite what it seems and the maze of symbols grows more complex with each encounter.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories II, featuring the cover design of Twelve Collections redone in black.

Twelve Collections Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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…

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories II, featuring the cover design of Twelve Collections redone in black.

The Bridge Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories II, featuring the cover design of Twelve Collections redone in black.

Miss Tamara, the Reader Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories II, featuring the cover design of Twelve Collections redone in black.

Amarcord Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover Impossible Stories II, featuring the cover design of Twelve Collections redone in black.

The Last Book Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover The Papyrus Trilogy

Escher's Loops Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

The Writer & The Ghostwriter Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

The Five Wonders of the Danube Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ Translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

On five bridges over the Danube, five strange and remarkable tales are told: tales of the sacrifices that are made for Art. For the painter, the sculptor, the writer and the composer, creation is inextricably entwined with violence, suffering and the darkest reaches of the psyche, and the bridge to enlightenment is the hardest of all to cross. Yet through the innocence of a dog all can be redeemed, in the miraculous climax of this complex and exotic fable.

Zoran Živković’s latest masterpiece, available in English to readers around the world.
Perhaps his finest work to date, The Five Wonders of the Danube is another of his famous “mosaic” novels, cleverly weaving multiple narrative threads into a tapestry of surrealism, reaching a magnificent conclusion in the final tale. Readers eager for more of his unique stories, combining simplicity of language and structure with thought-provoking explorations of life and death and reality will reread this one again and again.

The book was also released in hardcover, featuring the same cover design redone in black.

The Grand Manuscript Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover The Papyrus Trilogy

The Compendium of the Dead Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

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.

The book was also released as one of the works included in the hardcover The Papyrus Trilogy

A Biography of a Chance Miracle Tanja MALJARTSCHUK translated by Zenia Tompkins

A Biography of a Chance Miracle explores the life of Lena, a young girl growing up in the somewhat vapid, bureaucracy-ridden and nationalistic Western Ukrainian city of San Francisco. Lena is a misfit from early childhood due to her unwillingness to scorn everything Russian, her propensity for befriending forlorn creatures, her aversion to the status quo, and her fear of living a stupid and meaningless life. As her friends enter college, Lena sets forth on a mission to defend the abused and downtrodden of San Francisco—be they canine or human—armed with nothing more than an arsenal of humor, stubbornness, chutzpah and no shortage of imagination. Her successes are minimal at best, but in the process of trying to save San Francisco’s collective humanity, she may end up saving her own. At first glance a crazy and combative girl, Lena just may be the salvation that the Ukrainians of San Francisco sorely need.

With haiku-like precision, Tanja’s deceptively simple writing style blends surrealism and magical realism with satirical wit, occasionally outlandish humor and poignant social commentary. The German literary media has described her depictions of contemporary Ukraine as full of humor and absurdity, but “more exact and harsher” than those of her peers, comparing her to the 19th-century Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin and hailing her as “a name to be remembered.” This work, her most provocative to date, was a finalist for the 2012 BBC Book of the Year Award in Ukraine, and has been lauded as “simply ingenious” by fellow Ukrainian authors.

The Image Interpreter Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Randall A. Major

In a carriage of the Paris metro, nine people cross paths one ordinary Friday morning: a retired office worker who comes there purely to read; a tourist revisiting the memories of sixty years ago; a funeral mourner who has discovered the beauty of cemeteries; an author in search of her characters; a young man with a reality problem; an elderly woman with memory issues; a military administrator with a secret hobby; a jilted woman who has the key to the perfect match; and a secret agent high on adrenaline. Each in turn encounters that ubiquitous and unavoidable gadget: the cell phone camera. Each comes to a realization that changes their life forever. But who is the tenth person in the carriage, and what do her photographs tell her about the other nine that they could not possibly know themselves?

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

The Narcissism of Death Svetozar SAVIĆ translated by Vuk Tošić

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.

The Sorrow of Miles Franklin beneath Mount Kajmakčalan Ivan ČAPOVSKI translated by Paul Filev

In the latter years of World War I, renowned Australian writer Miles Franklin travels to the Macedonian Front, joining as a nurse at the Scottish Women’s Hospital near Mt. Kajmakčalan. Soldiers from many nations surge across a Macedonia that has been partitioned, absorbed by its neighbors. Its people struggle to survive in the face of staggering losses and being forcibly conscripted into foreign armies fighting on their soil.

Amidst it all, Miles captures the names and hopes of the oppressed, recording their travails, their quiet triumphs, and the turmoil of a nation affected by events beyond its control.

This fictionalized account of a short period from Miles Franklin’s life is based on her own writing and contemporaneous documents, supported by extensive additions from local history and culture.

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Ciuleandra Liviu REBREANU translated by Gabi Reigh

Written in the interwar period and published in 1927, this psychological thriller has captured the imagination of Romanian readers ever since. The book begins with a murder, as Puiu, a young aristocrat, strangles his wife on the night of the royal ball. To avoid a public trial and prison sentence, his father arranges to have him committed to a mental asylum.

Puiu’s discussions with his psychiatrist force him to confront his conscience and lead him to trace the root of his murderous passion to a wild, Dyonisian peasant dance called the Ciuleandra, where he first glimpsed his future wife. Unfortunately for Puiu, though, his psychiatrist may have more than a professional interest in the case…

This story of obsessive love paints a fascinating picture of the changes in Romanian society at the beginning of the 20th century. The work echoes the cultural landscapes evoked by Russian writers such as Dostoevsky and Gogol, as moments of high drama and emotional intensity bring to life the complex relationship between a decaying aristocracy and the rural world.

Hidden Camera Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Alice Copple-Tošić

A quiet, somewhat neurotic undertaker spends his days caring for his exotic fish, and of course his silent bodies as they arrive. One day, quite out of the ordinary, he receives a ticket to the movies. The movie, however, turns out to be of him, apparently filmed without his knowledge! Convinced that he is being targeted by a TV reality show, he plays along, only to be dragged from one adventure to the next, in a fantastic journey that evolves into a story of love, of death, and of ultimate creativity.
And through his travails we discover new perspectives on our own roles in an increasingly insensitive and scripted world.

The book was also released in hardcover, featuring the same cover design redone in black.

The White Room Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Randall A. Major

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.

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.

Gladwell the Parodist—A Whydunnit Tamar Yellin

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…

Me and Lin, Afterwards Ana STOJANOSKA

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.

The author 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.

The Four Deaths and One Resurrection of Fyodor Mikhailovich Zoran ŽIVKOVIĆ translated by Randall A. Major

A bizarre encounter between doubles in a foggy park. The mysterious sudden death of one of the passengers in a train’s restaurant car. The hilarious yet tragic consultation of a psychiatrist with her highly unusual patient. A conversation in a Turkish bath between an invisible stranger and a penniless gambler. What do all these odd situations have in common?

It is their famous, brilliant and troubled protagonist, for in this, the latest imaginative explosion from the brain of Zoran Živković, the main character is none other than the magnificent author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov: our eponymous Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (a.k.a. F. M. D. 19).

The scenes may seem familiar, but Živković takes the great novelist to places he has never been before and to which no other writer would dare take him: into parallel realities, into Orient Express-like murder mysteries, into the realms of artificial intelligence and future miracles. And indeed, he does die four times, and indeed he is resurrected into an afterlife only an admirer who loved him with his whole heart could dream up for him…

This book was also released in hardcover, using the same image redone in black.