Predrag Šiđanin // CANAL STREET
The patchwork of short stories
ON A PATCHWORK OF STORIES
I wrote one of these stories this morning, another a few days ago, some only a month or two ago, and others many years ago. Most were scattered across folders, files, computers, USB drives, notebooks and books; a few existed only in my head. Like the one I wrote this morning.
Most of the stories had already served as material for my novel Surprise Mode, where they found their place within the narrative. Recently, inspired by the publication of the anthology Erotikon (Poetum, 2026), I decided to gather and select them for a book of their own.
Then I introduced an element that some readers may like less: artificial intelligence.
With a few exceptions, I illustrated the stories with images generated with the help of AI. To do this, I had to reduce each story to a kind of meta-story – a compact prompt describing its essential visual elements. Some images worked immediately; others required several rounds of additional instructions. Most eventually reached a satisfactory form.
This multimedia concept inevitably raises a question: does a ready-made image interfere with the reader's imagination? Literature normally leaves the visualization of characters, spaces and events entirely to the reader. Here, the image offers a visual direction that may become mixed with the reader's own imagination. I was aware of that risk, but decided to keep the concept—uncompromisingly.
The patchwork
A patchwork is made by sewing pieces of different fabrics into a single whole. The word is also used metaphorically for bringing disparate elements together into a meaningful context.
This book is my patchwork of stories.
The only thread that necessarily connects them is that they are mine. Some were published under my name, others under the pseudonym ZKMDY, and some under Ema Neuman. But behind all of them is the same author.
The stories come from very different periods. Some are little more than expanded micro-fiction; others are conventional short stories. I have deliberately mixed them together, without chronological or thematic order. Their juxtaposition is what makes the patchwork.
Some are emotional and invite identification; others are intellectual, moral, playful, aesthetic or existential. Some record events, some illuminate characters, while others ask questions—or offer answers—to things such as love, freedom and the limits of tolerance. Some depend primarily on atmosphere, others on surprise; a few may even alter the way reality itself is perceived.
Read together, they might sometimes seem to have been written by several different authors. They do not share a single recognizable stylistic signature. That realization made me wonder about the nature and value of a story itself. Why does a story need to exist? Would its absence matter to the reader? What remains after it has been read?
There are too many possible questions. I eventually stopped trying to answer them.
The stories are here simply as surprises.
Some grew out of personal experience; others are entirely imagined. Some characters have real-life origins, while others are fictional. There is relatively little metafiction here, unlike in some of my novels.
Eroticism, which plays a smaller role in my novels, is more prominent in this collection, although I have considerably reworked and self-censored some of the older material. Those stories are marked with a small “e.” Several originated many years ago, when they existed only on paper or obsolete digital media, and some had to be reconstructed from those old records before being adapted for this edition.
Stories beyond the page
Three stories in this patchwork also exist as virtual-reality projects.
For Picasso's Dream, from Surprise Mode, visitors at a book presentation could enter a virtual Picasso studio and experience the story without my reading it aloud. They could move freely through the space, listen to the complete narrative and observe the paintings on the walls, including the unfinished Les Demoiselles d'Avignon still standing on the easel.
The second VR visualization is Comrade Tito Loved Art. The visitor enters a virtual gallery containing digital versions of paintings from my corresponding cycle, originally painted in oil on 150 × 150 cm canvases. In the virtual environment, the paintings become dynamic: they move beyond their two-dimensional surfaces, change and lose their colour. The complete text of the story is also available on the gallery's frontal wall.
The third VR work, The Rabbi, forms part of a larger project called Spiral of Words. The story appears within a spiral constructed from texts by three authors. The visitor can read the narratives and, using a VR controller, select individual words and arrange them into a temporary, personal story or poem.
For Comrade Tito Loved Art, a sequence from the VR project is used as the illustration in this book.
These stories do not represent my worldview. They offer possibilities—different perspectives, different ways of seeing.That is the idea behind this book: a hint of multimedia between its covers, a patchwork of stories, images, memories, fiction, reality and virtual space.