ELKOST International literary agency - Kucherskaya's novel short listed for Yasnaya Polyana

http://lenta.ru/news/2013/09/10/polyana/

Maya Kucherskaya's Auntie Mina (Tiotia Motia) is a finalist of the 2013 Yasnaya Polyana literary award.

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DADDY WASSUP, a flow novel by Andrei Gelasimov

Rights sold: France - SYRTES, Germany - AUFBAU, Russia - GORODETZ, World Arabic - AL MADA

Winner of the 2021 Moscow Art Prize (Russia)

One day in 2016, a rap group from Russia and its leader Booster, aka Pistoletto, aka Tolya, got in troubles during a tour in Germany. First their rehearsal was interrupted by a police raid in search for drugs, then at their night concert one the crowd got killed in a fight, and one of the musicians got arrested and put in jail. Tolya-Booster meets with frau Steinbach who owns the venue of their show, only to find out that she is in fact his once-girlfriend Maya who immigrated to Germany a decade ago. Back in 1990s then 17-years-old Tolya and Maya both lived in Rostov, a city with a well-deserved reputation of Russia's criminal capital: armed gangs all around, corrupt government and police agents, sweeping poverty, drugs, and beyond that a real war in the nearby Chechnya.

Novel's plot develops during about twenty years, from the late 90s to the present. There's no political declarations in the novel: Tolya-Booster is strictly and deliberately apolitical. There is no social pathos in it as well: none of the protagonists give a damn about problems of the society they live in. However, Gelasimov's fictional characters mirror the reality of what's happening with Russians for last two decades: carelessness, fatalism, disregard of any existing rules and laws, pure logic of survival, amazing neglect of death, endless insecurity, and firm belief that there's nobody around to help. Gelasimov's heroes has been through terrible times; and realize what they've lost.

In his main hit song Samsara, Booster formulates the main belief of his generation: one day the world will inevitably be a better place, though they are destined to see it only through the eyes of their children. Gelasimov defines his new book as a flow-novel. In rap terminology, flow is a term referring to rhythms and rhymes of song's lyrics and how they interact, i.e. it is the correct speed of reading, an impeccable technique of writing and playing text under the swinging bit.

The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, a novel by Ilya Ehrenburg (1927)

Publishers: France - JC LATTÉS (1981), Germany - Kindler (1969), SUHRKAMP (1976), VOLK UND WELT (1985, 1994), Die Andere Bibliothek (2016), Italy - RIZZOLI (1969), GIUNTINA (2009), Poland - CZYTELNIK (1957), Spain - MUCHNIK EDITORES (1978), USA/UK - POLYGLOT LIBRARY (1960), ELEK BOOKS (1965), Hungary - TEKA (1988)

Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (1928) is a version of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Svejk and Voltaire's Candide. The hero is a simple, good-natured Jewish ghetto tailor from Belorussia whose adventures take him through a half a dozen countries and several prisons. Lazar works as a rabbit breeder in Tula, rabbi in Frankfurt, police informer for Scotland Yard, film actor in Berlin, pioneer in Palestine, and painter in Paris. Ehrenburg satirizes among others the phony artists of the Parisian Latin Quarter and the speculators in the Weimar Republic.