An electrifying collection of stories from the febrile imagination of a young writer who traverses culture, genre and form.
An electrifying collection of stories from the febrile imagination of a young writer who traverses culture, genre and form.'This book marks the deeply unusual arrival of a singular new talent.' Mohsin Hamid'deserves a standing ovation' Christos Tsiolkas'powerful, inventive and self-assured' Australian Book Review'Ennis Cehic has done something remarkable.' The Saturday PaperA 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.
In this debut collection of short stories, Ennis ΔehiΔ uses deeply flawed characters to cleverly reflect the absurdity of late-stage capitalism. Sadvertising identifies obsession, narcissism and neuroses as reasonable responses to the oft-insane world of marketing by examining the enormous power of advertising alongside the relative powerlessness of the people who create it. In these fables, a wordless visit from the creative director unsettles an office for weeks; a world-shaking opinion piece receives only a handful of comments on LinkedIn; two strategists make the revolutionary choice to reimagine consumers as people. While most of the stories in this collection are speculative in nature, there are some that end with the intended meaning blatantly stated. These stories finish with a kind of punchline, rather than a more open-ended invitation to look beneath the surface of the text. As this became apparent, Sadvertising sometimes left this reviewer distracted with trying to discern the tone early in subsequent stories, rather than engaging with them fully from the outset. The inclusion of pieces of microfiction throughout amplified this-these are wonderful individually, but cumulatively lose their impact to unevenness. With scathing wit and black humour, Sadvertising offers hope and ennui in equal measure, and challenges readers to interrogate how, and what, they consume. Chris Alphonso is a writer and freelance editor from Melbourne.
Ennis Cehic is a writer whose work focuses on ideas of displacement, creativity and existentialism.His writing, including essays, fiction and memoir, has been published in a variety of literary journals and publications including Meanjin, Assemble Papers, Going Down Swinging and others.In 2018 Ennis was selected as an inaugural recipient of the Wheeler Centre's Next Chapter writers' scheme by judges Christos Tsiolkas, Benjamin Law, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Ellen van Neerven. He was mentored by Nam Le.He is the author of New Metonyms, a literary photography book about his homeland Bosnia & Herzegovina, released with photographer Shantanu Starick in 2020.Since 2007, Ennis has been working in the advertising industry as a copywriter, brand strategist and creative director.He lives and works between Melbourne and Sarajevo.
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