November 29, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Zoran Zivkovic Signs with New Publisher
Aio Publishing Company Will Publish the European World Fantasy Award Winner 

Charleston , SC – Zoran Zivkovic’s 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, has signed with Aio Publishing Company, LLC, for the American and Canadian release of three of his highly acclaimed mosaic novels, with more likely to follow.

Zivkovic won the 2003 World Fantasy Award in the novella category for The Library. Although he has been steadily building an American fan following, h is work has not been widely available in the American trade market until now. Consequently, publisher Tiffany Jonas of Aio says she’s pleased to announce that Zivkovic’s mosaic novels Seven Touches of Music, Impossible Encounters, and Steps Through the Mist will be published under the house’s imprint starting in 2006, bringing Zivkovic’s works to a much wider North American readership.

The works will each appear as a standalone volume. “Zivkovic’s works each have such conceptual richness and depth,” says Jonas, “they really merit a significant breadth of space of their own. The thoughtful reader will want to taste the surface—to roll it around the tongue, so to speak, then let the ideas breathe. It takes time to fully digest the philosophical underpinnings and the wonders beneath the surface of each story, and that’s what we’re trying to provide.”

Equally artful and distinctive are the presentation formats favored by Aio. The publishing house recently won an award for its design work on Ian R. MacLeod’s novel The Summer Isles. The design was honored at the 2005 Chicago Book and Media Show, where it took top honors in the general trade category. “We’d like to push ourselves to another level with Zoran’s works, something along the lines of the quality of The Summer Isles,” says Patrick Jonas, the house’s art director, “but a bit more innovative, to match the uniqueness of the author.”

In Seven Touches of Music, seven stories revolve around music as a shared theme: a teacher of autistic students, an ordinary librarian, the buyer of a music box from a consignment store, an elderly woman in a train station, a retired scientist-turned-painter, a dying professor, and a violin-maker’s apprentice each privately encounter music in a uniquely powerful experience. In Impossible Encounters, six men in separate stories face either an impossible choice or a stunning revelation delivered by a stranger, only to find that despite his choice, his fate does not lie in his own hands. And in Steps Through the Mist, five women separately encounter time or reality twisted to startling effect.

Zivkovic and the publishing house were first connected through reader and critic William Thompson, who recommended the author to Aio after receiving a copy of The Summer Isles. The sale was made through Zivkovic’s literary agent, John Jarrold.

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About Aio Publishing Co., LLC Aio Publishing Company was founded in January 2004 in Charleston, South Carolina. Dedicated to broadening speculative fiction bookshelves by adding works of a literary and sociological strain, the company seeks to publish complex, satisfying fiction in a high quality format encompassing visually striking covers, quality paper, graceful typesetting, and innovative design. Its flagship novel, a limited edition of World Fantasy Award winner Ian R. MacLeod’s The Summer Isles was followed by Nocturne by first novelist Jus Neuce, and two new Aio books are currently slated for release in 2006: The Steam Magnate by Canadian author/artist Dana Copithorne and World Fantasy Award-winning author Zoran Zivkovic’s mosaic novel Seven Touches of Music. The company recently won top honors for its book design for The Summer Isles at the 2005 Chicago Book and Media Show. For details about the company and its books, see www.aiopublishing.com.

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For more information, contact:

Tiffany Jonas, Publisher
Aio Publishing Company, LLC
P.O. Box 30788
Charleston , SC 29417
trjonas@aiopublishing.com
877.756.5429