Featured titles
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INTO THE THICKENING FOG, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov
Rights sold: France - ACTES SUD, Russia - EKSMO, World English - AMAZON CROSSING,
Sometimes a novel describes reality so well it creates a physical sensation. Into the Thickening Fog could make even readers in the tropics pull up a blanket.
A famous director returns to his hometown, a tiny city in Russia’s Far North, where he foolishly shows up without even a scarf. But Filippov can’t head straight to his friend’s apartment to share the bad news he’s traveled so far to deliver. The city’s centralized heating system has broken down, chaos ensues, and Filippov finds himself walking through the frigid weather. He struggles to see and even to stand up straight as he stumbles forward, detoured at every turn by obstacles both real and imagined. Luckily, he has a flask of Hennessy and a sense of humor.
At once hilarious and stark, this novel is a great entry point for reading one of Russia’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Thanks to Andrei Gelasimov’s gift for cinematic scene-setting, you might feel like you’ve just returned from Siberia and are shaking a case of delirium tremens when you finish reading.
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Conversation in the Rooms. Karamzin, Chaadayev, Herzen, and the Beginning of Modern Russia. Collected essays by Kirill Kobrin, 2018
Rights sold: Russia – NLO
This Kobrin's book is dedicated to a modernisation of Russian society in 19 century. It is about a creation of a special verbal code within the Russian language, the one used until today to discuss the most important humanitarian issues: politics, culture, social affairs, questrions of morals and ethics. Three protagonists of Kobrin's essays are Nikolai Karamzin (first European Russian writer and historian), Peter Chaadaev (his "Philosophical Letters" written in French are still a cornerstone of any discussion about relations between Russia and the West), and Alexander Herzen (first Russian socialist, Karl Marx's rival in European communist and socialist movement of that time); thanks to their efforts, the very possibility of such discussions became possible. In his essays, Kobrin shows how the Russian society accepted and transformed the ideas of enlightenment and romanticism, and applied them to the pre-existing social struggles.
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