Featured titles
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CASE OF ENGINEER TOWN, 2008
Rights sold: Russia – Chronicler
A nomad city of Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire (the map of which is just identical to a map of the Russian Empire), appears suddenly in the beginning of XVIII century in the area of Novocherkassk City in the Province of Don Cossack Voisko. The city does not fit into the picture of the real world; it moves every day a couple kilometers from the point it was seen before; Mongol Emperor Tughe, the ruler of the city, knows nothing about the existence of Russian Emperor Alexander (who in turn has never heard of Tughe).
Otroshenko creates a reality in which the relation between incidents, characters, and setting could not be based upon or justified by laws of nature or their normal acceptance by human mentality.
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Ancestor, a novel by Vladimir Makanin (1982)
Rights sold: Germany - Volk u. Welt, Spain - Alfaguara, Marbot
A satirical vision of the Soviet Union at the times of the Thaw.
Central figure of Makanin´s Ancestor is Old Yakushkin, a healer who has the gift of curing the terminally ill pacients abandoned by official medicine. His healing methods cannot be less orthodox: he waits for the patient to have a crisis to yell at him, shake him, torment his spirit until all his resistance is broken. The satisfactory cure of the dying man is obtained on the basis of terrible speeches and very little food. With irony and pathos, wit and malice, Makanin introduces us to the feverish Yakushkin in all his heartbreaking spiritual evolution: a young playboy, he was accused of fraud and confined to a labor camp in Siberia, where by accident he discovered in himself a healing gift. Makanin's hero recalls the great protagonists of the classical Russian literature.
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