AustLit

'An electrifying collection of stories from the febrile imagination of a young writer who traverses culture, genre and form.

'A man grows tired of his open-plan office and builds a fort made of stationery. A woman's euphoria at finally achieving Desktop Zero is quickly replaced with despair. A group of copywriters dream of being poets, and a disillusioned sales executive overthinks his think piece.

'In the mind-bendingly upside-down world of Sadvertising, iPhones have feelings, brands come to life, creative directors disappear into parallel universes and lowly freelancers become immortal. It's a world where gods, ghosts and muses stalk the corridors of bland and placeless offices, and the wondrous exists alongside the mundane.

'Short, punchy and direct, Ennis Cehic's satirical fables are box-fresh and shot through with pitch-black humour, existential dread and late capitalist yearning for meaning. They grapple with love and loneliness, art and commerce, dream and reality, and reflect the absurdity of the modern condition.

'Sadvertising is a surreal, subversive and utterly contemporary literary debut from an unforgettable new voice.' (Publication summary)

'What I remember most is how yellow his skin was. He looked bilious to me, sickly. The wrinkles on his forehead were sharper because of the yellowish hue, and the way he sat in his wheelchair, hiding his amputated leg with a jacket, he seemed like he needed to get back to bed, not go on a holiday to Bosnia and Herzegovina.'  (Publication abstract)

'We'd had enough of being called copywriters. At lunchtime we got together to discuss our plan. We decided to make a formal announcement at the end of the day and invited the rest of the agency to come into the reception area after 5 p.m. We let Jamie speak on our behalf because he was the most poetic of us all. We asked for our briefs to be called distillations. Lunches to be poetry readings. Meeting rooms to be named after our favourite wordsmiths. Brainstorms to be held in parks. Most of all, we wanted to stop writing calls to action. We wanted our audiences to contemplate and ruminate on the ideas we wrote about....' (Publication abstract)