Today, Eric Brown at The Guardian reviewed The Last Book:
“What starts as a commonplace detective story undergoes a slow transformation as Lukic’s dreams lead him to an enigmatic dénouement. Fans of Zivkovic’s stripped-down, elliptical fables will be delighted by this elusive metafiction, though some might find the literary conceit maddeningly slight.”
A poster announcing The Summer School of Creative Writing at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade. I will be in charge of the prose department.
(Apologies to those of you who cannot read the Cyrillic alphabet…)
It is friends that make life beautiful.
If it weren’t for the magnanimous assistance of my dear friend Jason Erik Lundberg, I would still have a hopelessly old-fashioned website.
It all started rather innocently. Jason emailed me recently, suggesting a digital step forward. His email address is included in my mailing list and I used to send him (as well as many other friends of mine) every now and then various items regarding my fiction writing: news, reviews, interviews.
Jason concluded, quite rightfully, that these were basically like blog entries in email form. So, why not do it properly: start a blog.
On 15 May 2008, Ray Olson at Booklist gave The Last Book a starred review:
“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.”
My mosaic-novel Twelve Collections and The Teashop (PS Publishing, UK, 2007) is one of the six finalists in the novella category for the inaugural year of the Shirley Jackson Awards.
The Shirley Jackson Awards will be presented on Sunday, 20 July 2008, at Readercon 19, The Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts.
Pushpak Karnick at Epic India has reviewed The Last Book:
“At a time when the market seems to be flooded daily with paperbacks that run along the alphabet, exhort the cliché, revel in presenting a stereotypical ‘Yuppie’ outlook, and (to say the least) fondly follow a long-forgotten dogma that the center of the Universe lies in the Central Park; here comes a novella that makes a detour in time and style, that sparkles with effervescent originality and acerbic (yet heartwarming) wit that can only be found on the other side of the Atlantic.”