Short Stories Collections

The book comprises two stories – «A Journal of a Disturbed Mind» and «A Man Who Loved Women». While the former story is permeated with intimate atmosphere, the latter has a very realistic, almost naturiralistic way of depicting phichological and personal features of a man obsessed with women. The book was published with the support of Croatian Ministry of Culture.

A collection of short stories in which reality turns into a paradox while phenomena arising from both subjective, intrapersonal world of subconscious, and objective reality are being questioned. The book was published with the support of Croatian Ministry of Culture.

A collection of short stories with two reversed mirrors – a male and a female. The stories are trying to point to the nuances of male and female psychology and the relationship towards the world – with everything melting into a picturesque mosaic deceiving the world with its separateness, and saturation and merge at the same time. The book was published with the support of Croatian Ministry of Culture.

The world we live in is only one, yet the variety of experiences gives us thrills with their uniqueness, singularities and non-repetitiveness. This book brings two short stories – Bistro Gala and Letters to Milan – both witnesses to this profound individuality and non-repetitive versatility of human destinies and life paths. While Bistro Gala features a certain dose of irony and humour and introduces us to a small coastal town life and its inhabitants, the story Letters to Milan brings existential fate of life stories of two characters – a woman and a man, both middle-aged, who reveal most intimate details of their difficult daily lives. This work by the author Ksenija Premur is a masterly creation, lucidly and vividly witnessing to the world and times we live in, we all share and where we are distinguished in the myriad of destinies. This work is an excellent immersion into two worlds – one featuring a closed world of a small-town living where everybody knows everybody, where Bistro Gala is the meeting point of all the inhabitants, from the early morning coffee to the late night binge, while the other, Letters to Milan, features a complete opposite, an intimate world of a discourse on the deepest questions of life, and points to the existential and intimate environment the story was set into.

A collection of short stories grouped under three thematic headings where especially gripping are Buddhist Stories and Stories of a Boy which revisit the fundamental issues of every man through the prism of one boy’s search for answers. The book was published with the support of the Croatian Ministry of Culture.

The Content of Hour Glasses is a collection of a master-piece short prose, featured with reduced, packed and elliptic language. The plots of these short stories emerge from autobiographic elements and they also bring poetic and pragmatic statements in order to reach for metaphoric notes that apodictic stories produce starting from a single sentence. The book was published with the support of Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture in Vienna and the Society of Slovenian Writers.

This book is the first topic short story collection by Branko Pihač containing stories of classical SF subjects as emerged with SF genre in the literature. Although these stories are mostly from author’s earlier stages, they are already showing his signature style he has kept in his stories of other SF sub-genres; it is a classical balance between structural elements of a story, strong polarisation of characters, detailing significantly contributing to the general atmosphere and skilful plot outlining thus keeping readers’ attention in upward curve and leading towards a non-frivolous resolution. Along with explanations of scientific elements which in the form of technical discoveries are frequently the carriers of his stories, the author goes beyond into psychological analyses and philosophical speculations bordering onto scientific essays. Adding the predictions of some technological achievements almost becoming a reality today, accomplished dialogues of his characters and almost inevitable moralities particularly characterising this part of author’s work, this collection is deservedly part of Croatian SF anthology.

This collection is a second topic short story collection by Branko Pihač comprising philosophical, paraphychological and metaphysical subjects, along with the subject of artificial intelligence. Stories from this part of author’s oeuvre contain ever intriguing blend of technical elements of hardcore SF, lucid atmosphere and particular social relationships, almost regularly including crime elements and appropriate levels of humour. Skilfully woven plot keeps readers’ attention and tension throughout, until the resolution no reader shall find disappointing is reached.

This book is the third short story collection by Branko Pihač. In his futuristic stories the author analyses and contemplates existing social phenomena, extrapolates them and pushed his characters into situations so similar to the current reality they induce us to thinking but also worrying. The collection of stories on androids is an excellent foundation for setting up a platform for communication with robots in the future; there are also several horror SF stories for the fans of the genre. These stories naturally comprise comprehensive storytelling features of the author – there are elements of humour, crime and master rendering of hardcore SF technology, while almost film-like direction of the storyline and often double-twists of the plot guarantee the excitement to the very end. Although the stories feature SF, a deflection from the reality, their lifelike quality makes the stories stick in your mind.