Flashback Hotel

(Paperback)

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Collects two volumes of short stories by one of contemporary South Africa's most acclaimed novelists. Collects two volumes of short stories by one of contemporary South Africa's most acclaimed novelists. With a tender wit, Vladislavi cuts through the ordinary, the profound, and the truly perplexing to reveal absurdities and truisms alike. From a man who forms a strong emotional attachment to his neighbor's wall to the etymology-obsessed inventor of the Omniscope, Vladislavic's characters are as well-constructed as his sentences and as playful as his prose. Flashback Hotel collects two volumes of short stories by one of contemporary South Africa's most acclaimed novelists.

Reviews

"Sparkling, facetious, and entertaining." Kirkus Reviews

"The writing has a quality of unpredictability, a wildness that seeps through the fabric of Vladislavi's peerless linguistic control... Ivan Vladislavi is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him."-- Katie Kitamatura, BOMB Magazine

"Vladislavi is a rare, brilliant writer. His work eschews all cant. Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it."--Sunday Times

"His stylistic virtuosity, sardonic wit, playful inventiveness, and his cool intimations of menace transmute the banal into something rich and strange loaded with comic and philosophical significance."-- Mail & Guardian Review of Books

"One of South Africa's most finely tuned observers."-- Ted Hodgkinson, Times Literary Supplement

"Vladislavi is sensitively attuned to the uncanny phenomena that explode from the social fault lines of his city."-- Patrick Flanery, The Guardian

"Vladislavi is without doubt the most significant writer in South Africa today."-- Focus on Africa


"Ivan Vladislavimanages to mine southern African ore for the universal gem, delivering it in magical, lapidary prose. He fulfills every writers hope, as W.H. Auden put it, "to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere. And prized he deserves to be." Peter Godwin

Praise for Ivan Vladislavi:

"The Exploded View is a small masterpiece by one of the best writers working today."-- Jan Steyn, The Quarterly Conversation

"Outrageously deadpan funny, stylish and prophetic."-- Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

"Vladislavi's cryptic, haunting tale echoes Jorge Luis Borges and David Lynch, drawing readers into its strange depths."-- Publishers Weekly

"His art is about loosening the terrible grip of a world of dead images and opening the flow of new perceptions and fresh understanding."-- Sunday Independent

"Occupying a tantalizingly unnameable region between fable, allegory, and parable, Vladislavi pushes at form and content to make something strangely new and profound of the novel."-- Neel Mukherjee

"Vladislavi's narrative intelligence is nowhere more visible than in his way with language itself. Each section is perfectly judged; we enter incidents in medias res - as though they were piano tudes - and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome."-- Teju Cole

"'Vladislavi is a weaver of spells, and I read [The Folly] at once captivated and cautious as to how it would cap off its vaunting fantasy . . . a satire on - and a love letter to - human gullibility, and, as such, quite strange, and as special as it is strange."--Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent

Author Bio

Ivan Vladislavic is a novelist, essayist, and editor. He lives in Johannesburg where he is a Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. His books includeThe Folly,The Restless Supermarket,Portrait with Keys, andDouble Negative. Among his recent publications areFlashback Hotel, a compendium of early stories, andThe Loss Library. His work has won several prizes, including the University of Johannesburg Prize, theSunday TimesFiction Prize, and the Alon Paton Award for non-fiction. In 2015, He was awarded Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.