As part of this year's Fabula selection, which kicks off the month of national reading in March in partnership with the Slovenian Literary Critics' Association and the Celje Central Library, we will present a collection of short stories Experimental worlds Tatjana Plevnik (LUD Literatura, 2025). The book is part of a selection of the best literary works by Slovenian authors from the last two years, chosen by a group of renowned literary experts and literary critics. The collection Experimental worlds was selected by Martina Potisk, who justifies her decision with the following statement:

Tatjana Plevnik's collection Experimental Worlds consists of a range of short stories, insightfully intertwined with the death of the protagonist's partner, while persistently adopting different narrative perspectives and positions. The title itself therefore testifies to a unique exercise in recreating the possible in the style of "What if", but it also relies on a variety of approaches to processing loss, and consequently also on making sense of the feeling of transience and the mourning that results from it. The stories appear from the very beginning as peculiar projections, imbued now with eerie, terrifying and fairy-tale intonations, now accompanied by concise, extremely serious or meditative nuances. In particular, they are far from being airtight, but are always pleasantly unpredictable, which is not least contributed to by the writer's free wandering along the paths of narrative variation, which, against the background of overcoming uncertainty, loneliness and helplessness, brings a clear measure of creative playfulness, cheerfulness and vitality. The collection is rounded off by an imaginative construction, carried out within a reliable stylistic flexibility, with subtle humor, suggestiveness and inexhaustible imagination convincingly breaking through the darker layers of communication, which seem to be particularly unwavering messengers of the writer's vitality and ambitiously imaginative narrative moves. – Martina Potisk

We invite you to join us for a conversation with the author, in which we will shed light on the creation of the collection, its compositional design, and the relationship between loss, narrative variation, and creative imagination that characterize this literary work. The conversation will be moderated by Samo Roš.

Fabula's selection is a program of the national reading month, within which we are presenting a special sticker Fabula's selection and the book index marked nine carefully selected works, which will be presented in March at various locations around Celje and elsewhere in Slovenia. The books from the selection are already waiting for you in bookstores and libraries across Slovenia, and you are invited to a series of literary talks, where we will present individual titles from this year's selection together with authors, publishers and curators.