About the Book
The Serbian publisher “Zavod” will publish Zoran Zivkovic’s collected prose works both in Serbian and English. The Serbian language rights refer to the territory of Serbia, while the English language rights only refer to the territory of former Yugoslavia. This two language edition is scheduled for early 2010. This editition will contain ten books. PS Publishing has divided it; Impossible Stories 2 will contain three books; Compartments, Four Stories Till the End and Amarcord.
For years, Zoran Zivkovic has awed, entertained, and tantalized the
world of fantastic literature with his ingenious and moving
fabulations, tales of ordinary, often isolated people facing and being
transfigured by the strange, the improbable. Logic and illogic meet
head-on in Zivkovic's stories, and the outcome is always deeply
memorable.
Now, for the first time, Impossible Stories assembles between a single set of covers five of the author's
distinguished story-cycles, as well as the stand-alone 'The Telephone':
twenty-nine stories in all.
In Impossible Stories (PS Publishing version) you will find:
Time Gifts:
A mysterious visitor comes to see three desperate human beings across
the ages: an astronomer, a paleolinguist, and an old watch-maker; he
has a unique but ambiguous time-gift for each one of them. His true
identity is known only to an insane artist locked up in her asylum
studio. But who would believe an artist in this world, even if she were
not insane?
Impossible Encounters: Six strangely
related stories about encounters that could or should never have
happened. Including conversations with God and the Devil, with an alien
and one's older self; and the answer to the enigma: where do off-duty
story characters go?
Seven Touches of Music: Seven
stories about moments of divine revelation through music, which leave
no mark beyond the ephemeral instant of their perception. Among the
remarkable epiphanies witnessed are an old widower glimpsing an
alternate existence, a librarian dreaming the death of all knowledge,
and an artist's rendering of inscrutable alien messages.
The Library:
A cycle of six thematically linked stories, droll renditions of the
nightmares ensuing upon misplaced, or (of course) excessive,
bibliophilia. 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; a connoisseur of hardcovers strives
to expel a lone paperback from his collection...
Steps Through the Mist:
Five women of various ages face, each in her own way, what seems to be
the deterministic trap of Fate. A schoolteacher, a fortune-teller, a
young woman on a skiing holiday, an inflexible old spinster, a girl who
can collapse reality into any shape: when another dreams you, or
controls you, or invests you with godlike power, can there be any
escape, ever?
