The Encyclopedia of the Dead

Danilo Kis is one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe. This collection of short fiction delves into uncanny characters, magical places and millennia of history. From the story of a counter-prophet, Simon Magus, who performs a blasphemous miracle in ancient Samaria, to 'Red Stamps with Lenin's Head', revealing the heartbroken secret of a poet's work, to 'The Encyclopedia of the Dead' an almighty catalogue of the life of every ordinary person to have died since 1789, these are tales brimming with imagination, horror, comedy and the sublime.

Danilo Kis was born in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1935. After an unsettled childhood during the Second World War, in which several of his family members were killed, Kis studied literature at the University of Belgrade where he lived for most of his adult life. He wrote novels, short stories and poetry and went on to receive the prestigious NIN Award for his novel Pescanik. He died in Paris in 1989. Mark Thompson is a British historian. His published work includes Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kis.