Flashback Hotel

"Ivan Vladislavic manages to mine southern African ore for the universal gem, delivering it in magical, lapidary prose. He fulfills every writer's hope, as W.H. Auden put it, "to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere." And prized he deserves to be." -- Peter Godwin

"Ivan Vladislavic occupies a place all of his own in the South African literary landscape: a versatile stylist and formal innovator whose work is nevertheless firmly rooted in contemporary urban life." - JM Coetzee

"The writing has a quality of unpredictability, a wildness that seeps through the fabric of Vladislavic's peerless linguistic control... Ivan Vladislavic is one of the most significant writers working in English today. Everyone should read him." -- Katie Kitamatura, BOMB Magazine

"His stylistic virtuosity, sardonic wit, playful inventiveness, and his cool intimations of menace transmute the banal into something rich and strange loaded with comic and philosophical significance." -- Mail & Guardian Review of Books