Synopses & Reviews
Zoran Zivkovics work can be hard to distill into a few sentences. Interzone perhaps gives it the best shot: [T]his is sophisticated, philosophical fantasy of the highest order. Zivkovic, who has been variously compared to such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stanislew Lem, won the 2003 World Fantasy Award for The Library. Although he has been steadily building a North American fan following, his work has not been widely available in the American and Canadian trade market until now.'Seven Touches of Music' will be published by a publishing house with a growing reputation in innovative book design. The company recently won top design honors in the general trade category at the November 2005 Chicago Book and Media Show, and its striking black-on-black design for 'Seven Touches' also easily stands out from the crowd.In this finely written, highly unusual mosaic novel, seven ephemerally connected stories revolve around music as a shared theme: a teacher of autistic students, a librarian, the buyer of a music box, an elderly woman waiting in a train station, a retired scientist-turned-painter, a dying professor, and a violin-makers apprentice each privately encounter music in a uniquely powerful experience. Speculative fiction review publication SF Site writes, "Meditations, each story possesses the whispered longing and apprehension of a prayer."
Synopsis
This experimental mosaic novel by a Serbian author—who is often compared to such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges—consists of seven wispily-connected stories about unexpected encounters with music. A teacher of autistic students, a librarian, the purchaser of a music box, an elderly woman at a train station, a scientist-turned-painter, a dying professor, and a violin-maker's apprentice seem deceptively ordinary until sudden shifts in time or place thrust them into a realm where all the conventional ways of appreciating music seem not to apply.
About the Author
Zoran Zivkovic is the author of The Book/The Author, The Fourth Circle, and The Library and is the editor of the anthology Leviathan Three. He is the recipient of the 2003 World Fantasy Award, and his work has been published in 11 countries, produced for television, and optioned for film.