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 Zivkovic explores the collision of realities: a man encounters an alternate self, a woman out on a shopping trip runs into her dead neighbour and a fourteen-year-old girl chases her seventeen-year-old future son across town. Through absurd predicament, surreal situations and hot pursuit, Zivkovic addresses deep and ultimately poignant questions of fate and chance, the vagaries of human character and the hidden potential which lies within us all.

From Publishers WeeklyTime and space are fluid and perspectives are intriguingly alien and off-kilter in this cosmological first novel from Serbian author Zivkovic. Built from multiple intertwined plots fleshed out in short chapters rich with impressionistic images, it attempts the difficult feat of conveying a parallel world through the experiences of characters largely unaware that alternate realities exist. Two principal story lines—one involving a Buddhist techno-whiz who creates a female computer program, the other concerned with a medieval novitiate who witnesses the mystical resurrection of a master whom he believed dead—anchor a narrative that also admits episodes in which Archimedes, Stephen Hawking, Nikola Tesla and other scientific luminaries find ways to slip the bounds of the time-space continuum and inadvertently travel to a common meeting place. Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and Conan Doyle all make appearances in the final chapters to deduce a dizzying, if talky, rationale for what exactly is going on. Zivkovic does a superb job of communicating the befuddlement, confusion and awe of individual characters as they wrestle with mysteries that exceed the understanding that their time, place and intellectual capacity permits. He also suggests a coherent cosmic blueprint that incorporates the novel's many episodes yet still remains intriguingly beyond full comprehension. Not all the mysteries are laid bare at the novel's somewhat abrupt end, but readers will enjoy the tale's epistemological gymnastics and the interplay of real and imaginary personalities. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistFour great scientists--Archimedes, van Ceulen, Tesla, and Hawking--gather at an ancient Buddhist temple deep in a jungle to meet computer scientist Srinavasa; his sentient computer program Rama; and the latter's child, sired by an ape. Elsewhere, a radio telescope awaits a specific signal, spherical beings go about their lives, the pack travels to see mysterious presences during the month they call Thule, and a medieval artist's assistant embarks on a journey into what he perceives as the circles of Hell. Then Sherlock Holmes receives a mysterious note--a perfect circle--and must join forces with his nemesis Moriarty to close the Fourth Circle. As the prologue, which is also the ending, informs us, Holmes' task is not one of obtaining answers but one of asking new questions and making contact across the varied worlds of the novel. Zivkovic distinguishes the book's discrete narratives stylistically and links its semicircular development back to itself seamlessly, opening the door to speculation about what happens next, which turns out to be a perfectly satisfactory conclusion. Regina SchroederCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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 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?

COMPARTMENTS 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. FOUR STORIES TILL THE END 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. AMARCORD 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 anatomise the essence of what makes human beings tick, our passions, our vanities and yearnings; the very memories which make us who we are.

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… Also in this volume: “The Teashop,” a superb new novelette about storytelling and the miraculous weavings of Fate.