The Five Wonders of the Danube

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 Zivkovic'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.Long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2013.

Literature & Fiction

Živković, Zoran

Contemporary

Zoran Živković

A series of mysterious deaths in the Papyrus Bookstore brings literature-loving police inspector Dejan Lukic to investigate. Together with the attractive owner, Vera Gavrilovic, they discover the elusive Last Book is responsible. Seemingly causeless deaths multiply, the National Security Agency, a secret apocalyptic sect, and others are drawn in, and the secrets of immortality, death, and reality itself are revealed in a masterful trilogy that demonstrates the magical and ultimately benevolent power of literature. Includes The Last Book, The Grand Manuscript, and The Compendium of the Dead. Serbian master fantasist Zivkovic has written what may be the most delicious mystery by a speculative-fiction specialist since Stanislaw Lem's mind-boggling The Investigation (1974). Unlike Lem's novel, it is also a discreet, witty love story.-Publishers Weekly, USA

The Papyrus Trilogy

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. From nail clippings, to a hotel with its own zinc mine, and on to the tale of a fourteen-year-old girl who chases her seventeen-year-old future son across town, Živković delivers witty, often painfully sharp, fables to make you examine your life, death, reality, and everything in between. Twelve Collections was a finalist in the novella category for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award, longlisted for the 2008 British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novella, and has been made into a five-part TV series, “The Collector.” The Bridge won the 2007 Isidora Sekulic Award and the Golden Hit Liber Award (given by Serbian National Television to the most prominent prose book published in 2007), as well as being shortlisted for the 2007 NIN Award.

Impossible Stories II

Impossible Stories I is a collection of several of the author’s finest works, including Time Gifts, Impossible Encounters, Seven Touches of Music, The Library (winner of the World Fantasy Award), and Steps through the Mist. The perfect introduction to the incredible world of Zoran Živković.  Impossible Stories might be approached as if one were inspecting a handsome piece of furniture, a cabinet in which each of any number of regularly sized and shaped drawers is built precisely to contain and to somehow exemplify its own metaphysical freight or uncanny puzzle, and it is in the rhythm and variety of the whole, too, that the nature of Živković’s craft can be apprehended and enjoyed. —Tony White, Wasafiri …even though they own and use computers, Živković’s characters seem decidedly nineteenth century. They are as intelligent and as neurotic as Poe’s personae, and admirers of that master of the outre–or of Borges, Gogol, Capek, and Lem–will be enthralled by them. —Ray Olson, Booklist …well worth reading for the ingenuity of Živković’s stories. He is extraordinarily clever and has a particular talent for devising awkward moral dilemmas for his characters. His writing is also … quite unlike that of anyone else.  —Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City

Impossible Stories I

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

The Book

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.

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? Runner-up for the 1998 NIN Award, by a World Fantasy Award-winning author

Time Gifts

Literary

Impossible Encounters

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.

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 Library

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 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... A November 2007 BookSense Notable Book Winner of the 2008 Gold Award for Superb Craftsmanship from the Detroit Club of Printing House Craftsmen

Steps through the Mist

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...

Twelve Collections

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Zoran Živković publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Zoran Živković