ELKOST International literary agency - AD: Maya Kucherskaya, Alexander Kabakov, and Alexei Makushinsky at the 2014 BuchWein Fair

Our authors Maya Kucherskaya, Alexander Kabakov and Alexei Makushinsky will take part in the Russian Program of the 2014 BuchWein Fair, Austria.

- 13 November 2014, 18.30 - 20.00

Evening with Maya Kucherskaya and Daria Wilke:

Contemporary Russian literature: with a woman’s view

Venue: Döblinger Hauptstrasse 62, 1190

- 14 November 2014:

Meet the laureates and finalists of the Big Book literary prize, 11.00 - 12.00 (with the participation of Alexei Varlamov, Maya Kucherskaya and Alexei Makushinsky)

Venue: Exhibition Centre Messe Wien, Hall D, Stand № 322

- 14 November 2014, 17.00 - 18.30

Meet the writers: Alexei Varlamov, Maya Kucherskaya, Andrei Gelasimov, and Alexei Makushinsky

Venue: Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Vienna, Brahmsplatz 8, 1040

- 15 November 2014, 11.00 - 12.00

New faces in contemporary Russian literature:

Alexei Makushinsky and Andrei Gelasimov

Venue: Azbuka Russian Bookshop, Döblinger Hauptstrasse 62, 1190

16 November 2014:

Presentation of The Old Man and the Angel by Alexander Kabakov, 11.30 - 12.00 (Messebühne im Literaturcafé)

Venue: Exhibition Centre Messe Wien, Hall D, Stand № 322

Featured titles

Sliding Into Isolation: Russia and the World. Diary of the pre-COVID Times With a Quarantine Epilogue. Collected essays by Kirill Kobrin, 2021

Rights sold: Russia – NLO

Kirill Kobrin himself is what we would call a rolling stone, a naturally born nomad. He has been moving from one place to another for the past 20 years, never really settling in one place, though eagerly absorbing everythying these places had to offer. While moving from one geographical point to another, he kept a diary explaining the cultural and political context immideately preceding the period of global lockdowns in 2021-2022. Reflecting upon objects, artefacts, texts and music he stumbled upon during the last three years, the author creates a detailed imprint of the precovid world that we left behind.

During the pandemic, he decided to publish this book sharing his thoughts about what was going to happen after the COVID. Should we expect the end of the world, or we can overcome this? Will the pandemic change people, make them more honest and better? Will humanity learn from this catastrophe some solidarity, humility and humanity? It is through answering these complicated questions the author invites us to a dialogue, or rather discussion about what was going on not that long ago and what is happening now.

See a short excerpt from Kobrin's Sliding Into Isolation: Russia and the World. in English (translated by Thomas Campbell) at openDemocracy project website:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-isolation-kobrin/

Confessions of a Young Novelist, 2011

Rights sold: Russia - Corpus, Estonia - Tanapaev,

Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these “confessions,” the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction.

He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction—playfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a character’s plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom “exist”?

At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This “young novelist” is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words.