The Ghostwriter
Cover art by Michael Smith.
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 Živkovi?'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.
"Though it is too soon to crown Zoran Živkovi? the new Borges, Seven Touches of Music makes him a leading candidate." —The New York Times Book Review
"Every philistine who questions what art is for should be hit over the head with a book by Zoran Živkovi? and then made to read it." — Infinity Plus
"Like Jorge Luis Borges, Živkovi? can create strange, alternate universes. Like David Lynch, he can balance menace and melancholy — be cruel and be funny at the same time." — The Seattle Times
"Živkovi?'s fiction is for those who can't get enough of others' dreams and wish them recalled in great detail." — Kirkus Reviews
"As in the work of Kafka, big ideas never feel dropped from on high. Rather, they rise up organically from within the story." — Time Out — New York
"Živkovi? channels philosophy and the fantastic [...] following his master Borges in imparting to those rarefied airs a sense of flesh, bone, and context within the pitiless procedure of genre literature." — Village Voice
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Zoran Zivkovic
Zoran Živković (born 1948) is a writer, essayist, researcher, publisher and translator. He was born in Belgrad, Serbia. His writing belongs to the middle European fantastika tradition, and shares much in common with such masters as Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka and Stanislaw Lem.
Zoran Živković graduated in literary theory from the Department of General Literature of the University of Belgrade in 1973. In 2000 his engagement in SF and in literary studies discontinued, and turned entirely to writing prose.
In 2007 he was appointed professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade where he now teaches Creative Writing.
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