Hidden Camera (Eastern European Literature) - Softcover

"Ž ivković 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."

The writing is wonderful, sometimes dense and foreboding, sometimes light and allusive, never less than accomplished, and always well-suited to the artistic task at hand.

A short, meaty book, this is an antimodernist parable heavy enough for you to know you've absorbed real substance, yet ironic enough to ensure you don't want to kill yourself when it's over.

Hidden Camera is a work of unexpected beauty and surprise. [...] Zivkovic is seeking to communicate something about the nature of life and death, of existence and non-existence, which bends perception into new and challenging shapes.

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.

Winner of the 2003 World Fantasy Award for his novella The Library . . . Zoran Zivkovic is an immensely talented fabulist whose work is somewhat reminiscent of Italo Calvino's wry and delightfully surreal postmodern fictions.

For all his control of mood and language, Zivkovic is a writer who prefers the playful to the profound, the scattering of seeds to the harvest.

An undertaker finds an invitation to a private showing of a movie stuck in his apartment door. Upon arrival at the theater, he discovers that there's only one other person in the audience, and when the "movie" turns out to be footage of him sitting in a park calmly eating his lunch, he becomes convinced that he's an unwitting participant in a sinister reality show, whose unseen cameras are determined to humiliate him in front of thousands of people. Certain that he's being filmed at every moment, he begins a bizarre odyssey through the dark and empty streets of his city, encountering increasingly absurd situations, becoming ever more paranoid and distrustful, and waiting for the opportunity to stage a rebellion against his hidden tormentors.