Book Reviews

GENEALOGY OF FRIENDS

Genealogy of Friends, memorial album, Službeni glasnik, Belgrade, 2024, 172 pp.

Genealogy of Friends by writer Jasmina Mihajlović (Službeni glasnik, 2024) contains memories of more than fifty public figures from the country and the world, whom she met during her life with her husband Milorad Pavić, and later. This memorial album “displays” over a hundred private photographs taken during the last thirty years. Genealogy of Friends is a testimony of a private nature. These are not memoirs, portraits or biographies, but intimate memories composed of sketches and small details. Read more here:

Daily newspaper Politika 2025

THE BORING BOOK

“THE BORING BOOK” IS A LABYRINTH OF THE MODERN AND THE ANCIENT

The Boring Book, Svaštara – Belgrade, Dereta, 2019, 2020.

In “The Boring Book,” Jasmina Mihajlović turned to humor, subtle horror, and entertaining essays. Her “Svaštara” (Miscellany), as the subtitle-genre of the book reads, is a summary of everything the author dealt with in her previous books: travelogues, love stories, following the phenomena of the modern world and its interweaving with the ancient…

Exciting, intriguing, at times painful, at times sharp. And deeply lived. From socio-sociological paradox to intimate-lyrical address.

Read more here:

ON THE SHORE OF THE KHAZAR SEA

1. On the Shores of the Khazar Sea – Amazon.com, Kindle Store, March 10, 2014.
2. На обали Хазарског мора – Laguna, March 18, 2014.
3. Xəzər dənizinin sahillərində (On the Shore of the Khazar Sea) – Translation Center under the Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Baku, 2015.
4. Xəzər dənizinin sahillərində (On the Shore of the Khazar Sea, digital edition) – Translation Center under the Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Baku, 2015.
5. ხაზართა ზღვის ნაპირებზე (On the Shore of the Khazar Sea) – Intelekti, Tbilisi, 2015.
6. На берегах Хазарского моря (На обали Хазарског мора) – Tsentrpoligraf, Moscow, 2017.
7. Love Story in Two Tales (original: On the Shore of the Khazar Sea) (爱情故事的两个版), 2018.
8. На березі Хозарського моря (On the Shore of the Khazar Sea), Kharkiv, Folio, 2020.

Before the readers is an unusual autobiographical prose. Dressed in a travelogue through exotic Azerbaijan and in a series of private-public memories, it speaks of the love of two Serbian writers whom not even death could separate.

Written smoothly, sometimes sharply, often wistfully, Jasmina Mihajlović’s book On the Shore of the Khazar Sea will introduce the reader to what Eurovision looks like in Euroasia, why the Caspian Sea is called the Khazar Sea in Azerbaijan, and what miraculous events took place on the border of two continents.

The four prose units that make up this book were edited by Jasmina Mihajlović, keeping faithful to the imaginative, original and unusual literary playfulness of Milorad Pavić, and skillfully intertwining two different prose manuscripts, her own and Pavić’s, into a harmonious collage and a surprisingly flowing and fresh whole.

“The Khazar Sea is not like other earthly seas and oceans: it is like a sea of dreams, even more like a sea woven from Another Reality, and most of all like what it truly is – THE SEA OF LOVE. In such (both virtual and real!) temporal-spatial coordinates moves the co-authorial pair of this book, who also represent its main characters: here Jasmina Mihajlović and Milorad Pavić find their eternal home, for Love itself is eternally embodied in the Word…”

Prof. Dr. Sava Damjanov

Review by Ana Atanasković read here

TRAVEL COLLECTION

1. Путна колекција – Belgrade, Alnari, 2008.
2. Путна колекција – Amazon.com, Kindle Store, 2014.

Travel Collection consists of a series of exciting travel stories that take place in Russia, Vojvodina, Greece, Egypt, Tunisia and Kotor.
If you want to find out what is happening with the Tolstoy family, what an earthquake looks like in Santorini, what secrets the walls of Kotor hide and what secrets the Egyptian pyramids hold, take a walk through this book. From the author of The Parisian Kiss, new surprises await you!

PARIS KISS

1. Париски пољубац. Novel – Novi Sad, Ljubitelji knjige, 2007(2).
2. Парижский поцелуй – Saint Petersburg, Azbuka, 2007.
3. Париски пољубац – Belgrade, Zavod za udžbenike, 2010.
4. The Paris Kiss – Amazon.com, Kindle Store, 2011.
5. The Parisian Kiss (巴黎之吻), Shanghai, Zhejiang, 2018.

Paris Kiss is a distinctive adventure-travelogue novel. It takes place over four days in Paris. At the same time, it is an entertaining metaphysical-philosophical-esoteric novel that can be read as a survival manual for the latest era we have stepped into. It is a book about how to overcome stress, how to buy little boots in Paris, what the future will look like, what will happen to Christianity and other religions, which are the good cafes in Paris, how Belgrade is seen from Paris, and how Paris is seen from Belgrade.

In addition to the fact that the real time of events is set in four days, Paris Kiss speaks of the moment in which all of us, the whole of humanity, find ourselves. It is about the threshold between a new era and the latest era. Or about the crossroads where one passes from an analog epoch into a digital one. That is why it also tells a story about love, solitude, fear, global climate change, nature as the greatest luxury, about Paris as a city that hides the entrance to the beyond, about male-female relationships and about the new epoch of the female divine. Paris Kiss seeks and finds the new messiah for whom the third millennium yearns.

This detective-alchemical novel with elements of science fiction and the deciphering of urban city codes attempts to look at the future through the past. It speaks, among other things, of the Mona Lisa code, megastores, major fashion brands, of immortality, and of whether speed prolongs life or annuls it. In any case, it is a triptych novel of considerable scope into which much has fit, including the reader’s excitement to see the end of the initiatory quest that is disguised as the purchase of three pairs of boots. Paris Kiss is an ultralight novel with weighty themes.

In Russia, the translation of the novel appeared for the Moscow Book Fair, at the end of November 2007. The unconventional design of the book is the work of Novi Sad designer Jovan Trkulja, whose works were proclaimed “The Best Design from Europe” in America.

LOVE WITH A DICTIONARY OF THE UNKNOWN

1. Љубав са речником непознатог – Novi Sad, Ljubitelji knjige, 2006, 2007(2).

“Love with a Dictionary of the Unknown by Jasmina Mihajlović is not just a book of essays about love. It is also a collection of recipes for a better quality, more fulfilling and happier emotional life; a handbook on the right to emotions; a step-by-step guide for overcoming the fear of love; a primer of concepts that form the foundation of love; a do-it-yourself guide for liberation from guilt; an encyclopedia of different types of love, emotional know-how… In short, Love with a Dictionary of the Unknown is a small women’s bible of new sensibility. Jasmina Mihajlović speaks in it – openly, from a female perspective – about what is usually not spoken about publicly, and even more rarely written about. She has found the right words to say what is most often kept silent.”

Prof. Dr. Neda Todorović

LOVE WITHOUT SECRETS

1. Љубав без тајни – Belgrade, Dereta, 2005.

In the book Love Without Secrets, Jasmina Mihajlović views love as a crucial fact in the life of every writer and every reader, but also as simultaneously the most public and most secret phenomenon of human life, insisting that there are many loves, and that the most beautiful and greatest is precisely the love in which the reader of this book finds themselves – now. “Our and the world’s love reality and tomorrow” seems to be the motto of the work Love Without Secrets, in which the author also speaks about how “love without secrets does not exist,” about the 21st century as a time when excess sacrifice was abolished, as well as about great, small and medium loves, avoiding love, love letters, the powerful and untouchable androgynous God, icons in life’s memorial, girlfriends as ideal lovers, the phenomena of love deception, patriotism and well-designed nature…

Jasmina Mihajlović’s work Ljubav bez tajni seems to be written in accordance with the motto of Erasmus of Rotterdam: „Life is a feast – either drink, or leave“, while the wit, wisdom and uncompromising positive energy in a time ruled by negation and depression announce that Ljubav bez tajni is a book that will yet be written and talked about. Didn’t John Lennon say: „All you need is love“.

Sanja Domazet, Данас

According to the reports of the „Bestseler“ list, the book Ljubav bez tajni placed 9th on the annual top list of non-fiction for the year 2006, with 14 weeks on the list of most-read books.

TRAVEL ALBUM

1. Путни албум – Belgrade, Dereta, 2004, 2005, 2006.
2. Child of the Sun Boat (original: Travel Album) (太阳船上的孩子) Shanghai, Zhejiang, 2018.

When you take intellectual and spiritual curiosity on a journey instead of luggage, then your album from that journey will be an autobiographical, diary and epistolary note. Small essays, letters to friends, notes and original comments make this book a guide for unusual tourists, for all those who want to sail through emotions, the heritage of centuries, friendship and the mysticism of landscapes that extend far beyond our views.

PUTNI ALBUM (TRAVEL ALBUM) is both a book of stories and a novel in stories and an anthropological essay and a private confession and a travelogue… It reads like an exciting thriller. It has drama, suspense, disturbing discoveries, an intimate yet non-trivial revelation of the marriage of two writers, Milorad Pavić and Jasmina Mihajlović. PUTNI ALBUM is something like a love travelogue with many layers, which can be drunk like a glass of spring water, but also like a glass of expensive champagne.

PUTNI ALBUM is the winner of the „Dereta’s Book of the Year“ award. NIN magazine included it among the ten best prose books for 2004. This book was continuously on the top ten of the bestseller list at Dereta’s bookstore for nine months.

Excerpts from reviews of Putni Album

„Putni Album is, therefore, a book of self-revealing “women’s writing” which mostly does not hide behind (post)feminist slogans but also does not shy away from displaying and exposing stereotypes regarding sexual, poetic or cultural prejudices; all the while depicting the shadow of the all-encompassing male world in the private and public sphere, it actually leaves its reach in an ingeniously indirect way… wittily thematizing the problem of “women’s writing” and cultural identity within largely worn-out images, describing its inner circles between pathos and irony, emphasized sentiment and discrete humor, between respect for tradition and the testing of postmodernist props, Putni Album is recommended, therefore, as reading at the same time sufficiently interesting and sufficiently challenging both for female and male audiences ready to invest something of their own curiosity and questioning into the reading.“

Tihomir Brajović, NIN

„More and more willingly and more and more often I read novels which „seriously try“ not to be one. For example, Putni Album by Jasmina Mihajlović… An intoxicating, yet genre-indefinable book.“

Radovan Beli Marković, NIN and Evropa

In this year’s publishing production, “Private Collection” by Jasmina Mihajlović is the most exciting and sophisticated book in which the author skillfully, playfully, transitions from one documentary level to Poe-esque (E. A. Poe) horror and dynamics.

Isidora Bjelica

“Private Collection” by Jasmina Mihajlović is exciting reading, as palimpsests always are, captivating with its delicate confessional tone that leads the reader straight into the magic of the story, where literature and reality merge and equalize. In “Private Collection,” Jasmina Mihajlović brings us the pulse of modern Europe, the tastes of the ever-exciting and epicurean Paris, stories about the destinies of cities, buildings, people… “Private Collection” is decent and modern prose reading, which is, in fact, a lovely mixture of travel, detective and urban material, with a strong aroma of love, passion, horror and fear that make up human life.

Sanja Domazet, “Danas”

“Private Collection” somewhat resembles a magic cube, as it can be followed in several lines that touch or intersect each other. It can be read as a diary, a collection of travelogues, a guide through world museums or a small collection of female urban hedonism. In the book “Private Collection,” we follow exciting, often dramatic journeys, forward and backward through time. We will thus go to Kotor, Bečej, Čelarevo, to the island of Santorini and then to Paris, Moscow, Yasnaya Polyana, Geneva, Monte Carlo and many cities in France, ending the journey in Belgrade – a city under bombs. In “Private Collection,” we will discover how the past and myths refract through the Internet age, connecting in a strange way the families Dunđerski, Tripković, Cituras, Tolstoy and Pavić-Mihajlović.

Suzana Polić-Radovanović, “Bazar”

“Private Collection” is one of those books that cannot be retold. In it, reality and dreams pulsate, intertwined so that they are easily confused, and when the thread is found, the lines are soaked with such layers of mystery that they are simply devoured, in order to glimpse the resolution.

Dragana Bukumirović, “Politika”

The book should be read because it is guided by the hand of love.

Dušica Milanović, “Politika”

LOVE STORY IN TWO TALES

6. Love Story in Two Tales (with Milorad Pavić) – Belgrade, Čigoja, 2004.
7. Ljubezenski roman v dveh zgodbah – /translated by Nives Vidić/ Nova Gorica, “Ma-no”, 2006.)

Jasmina’s virtual endowment and Milorad’s Tunisian white cage in the form of division merged into a unique love story. The love story is in Belgrade in one of the old houses on Kraljevića Marka Street in Savamala. Two loves, two manuscripts, intertwine into an interesting story – a true love romance.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

5. Private Collection – Belgrade, Dereta, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005.

Imagine what you can find in a writer’s private collection, in the secret compartments of their memory, in the exotic depths of their inspiration. Jasmina Mihajlović is a writer who leads the reader along her own obsessive paths. With the mysticism of her own questioning over the darkened places of former lives and deaths, Private Collection carries some different images and views that, in Jasmina Mihajlović’s manuscript, acquire alchemical outlines of eternal stories.

It is a series of exciting travel stories that, in addition to unusually experienced places and landscapes of our country and Europe, depict the author’s life with her husband, writer Milorad Pavić. Her stories, in addition to detective plot, elements of horror and fantasy, abound with lucid, modern, urban female observations of various phenomena of the last decade of the 20th century. In the book “Private Collection,” the reader will find diary, epistolary, confessional and travel prose. J. Mihajlović’s book actually contains the author’s private collection: unusual places in time and space, magical events, furniture, families, houses… Saying goodbye to the twentieth century with these stories, Jasmina Mihajlović incorporated elements of Art Nouveau into its design in the form of graphic design from the pen of the artist from the beginning of the century, Dragutin Inkiostri.

TWO KOTOR STORIES

1. Two Kotor Stories, Dereta, 1998, 2005.
2. Две которске приче (with M. Pavić) – Amazon.com, Kindle Store, 2014.
3. Two Kotor Stories, e-book, Jasmina Mihajlović and Milorad Pavić, 2015, DOO Media Art Content

The city of Kotor, the mystical center of the Bay of Kotor and Mediterranean culture, is the central pillar of the book by Jasmina Mihajlović and Milorad Pavić. Two stories that begin on different pages of the book meet at one point, which does not offer the reader a resolution in the finality and positivism of earthly days; the point of their meeting is the threshold of literary infinity into which the reader sails at the beginning, although they are not immediately aware of it. Jasmina and Milorad Pavić with their manuscript do not limit and narrow the mystical cosmos of Kotor; they make it infinite precisely through the theme and keys of the labyrinth of their stories.

THE STORY OF SOUL AND BODY

1. The Story of Soul and Body. Layers and Meanings in the Prose of Milorad Pavić – Belgrade, Prosveta, 1992.

1. The Boring Book. Svaštara – Belgrade, Dereta, 2019.
2. The Parisian Kiss (巴黎之吻), Shanghai, Zhejiang, 2018.
3. Love Story in Two Tales (original: On the Shore of the Khazar Sea) (爱情故事的两个版), Shanghai, Zhejiang, 2018.
4. Child of the Sun Boat (original: Travel Album) (太阳船上的孩子) Shanghai, Zhejiang, 2018