ELKOST International literary agency - JUST PUBLISHED: Ludmila Ulitskaya's Funeral Party in Finland

Ludmila Ulitskya's FUNERAL PARTY has just been released in Finland as Iloiset hautajaiset by Siltala Publishing

Featured titles

A School for Fools, a novel by Sasha Sokolov (1976)

Rights sold: Bulgaria - FAKEL, Brazil – ARS POETICA, Czech Republic - PROSTOR, Denmark - Munksgaard/Rosinante, Estonia – EESTI RAAMAT, France – SOLIN, Germany – SUHRKAMP, Greece – KOLLAROS, Hungary – NAPKUT, Israel - CARMEL, Italy – SALANI , Japan - Kawade Shobo Shinsha, Korea – MUNHAKDONGNE, Latvia – ZVAIGZNE, Lithuania - VAGA, Mongolia - MASH NUUTS MEDIA, The Netherlands – BEZIGE BIJ, VAN OORSCHOT, Poland – KONTRA, Portugal - CAVALO DE FERRO (PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE), Romania - ALLFA, Russia - AZBOOKA, OGI, Serbia – FILIP VIŠNJIC, Spain – CIRCULO DE LECTORES, MARBOT, Sweden – AWE/GEBERS, Switzerland – ZOÉ, Taiwan (Traditional Chinese language) - CHI MING, Turkey - TIMAŞ, USA – ARDIS, NYRB, World Arabic - NCT (Egypt)

A School for Fools is a journey through the mental landscape of a nameless, schizophrenic adolescent which he relates with the assistance of an author figure who may be the boy's older self. Through the kaleidoscopic prism of the teenager's schizoid mind, we share his bizarre perceptions and attempts to come to terms with the surrounding world.

Sokolov's A School for Fools has been called "a neglected masterpiece. Compared to Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago or Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Sokolov's brilliant novella shares with them the distinction of being one of the very few Russian novels to remain steadily in print. Pasternak's and Solzhenitsyn's novels are a continuation of the great nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition, Sokolov's marks the beginning of a new one.

The Third Heart (Potemkin), a novel by Yuri Buida (2008)

Rights sold: France – Gallimard, Russia - EKSMO

A short novel that narrates the improbable life of a Russian émigré in France and engages in polemical dialogue with the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov.

There was a time when nearly fifty thousand Russians lived in Paris (on the eve of World War I, they were hardly more than thirty-six thousand in all France). They prayed in Orthodox churches, sent their children to Russian schools, and discussed Dostoevsky in La Rotonde coffee shop.

Fyodor Zavalishin, also known as Theo, was one of those Russians who managed to escape the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in Paris. As many of them, he also visited a screening of Eisenstein's masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin in November 1926. As a soldier, in 1905 he took part in the suppression of the revolt in the Russian fleet. When he watched Eisenstein's impressive reconstruction of the massacre in the port of Odessa on the big screen, he suddenly felt guilt of being involved in this crime... Theo rushes to the nearest police station to make a confession, then tries to cure his remorse and guilt in a psychiatric hospital. There he learns from the newspapers a horrible story of seven women who were found murdered in a mass grave in Deauville. Without hesitation, Theo attributes the massacre to his former comrade in arms, badly disabled Ivan Domani, for whom he had just agreed to make erotic pictures of seven young creatures. Thus began a long Theo’s journey between violence and redemption ...

Buida’s The Third Heart is an amazing book that confirms more than ever that Yuri Bouida, who enjoys a great prestige in the country, occupies a prominent place in the great Russian literary tradition.