Featured titles
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The Book of Legendary Lands - 2013
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New York home of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s orchid-loving fictional detective, runs up against the resistance of fact. Wolfe’s house cannot be identified because Stout “always talked of a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street, but in the course of his novels he mentioned at least ten different street numbers – and what is more, there are no brownstones on 35th Street”. Using Eco’s typology, a fiction has been transmuted into a legend: “Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are in effect a modern invention, they have created flows of belief.” (from John Gray's review on English-language edition, full text http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/11/no-place-home)
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Yermo, a novel by Yuri Buida (1997, 2011)
Rights are handled on behalf of Editions Gallimard
Rights sold: France – Gallimard, Russia - Vagrius
With Yermo, Yuri Buida signs a breathtaking novel in which he develops his reflection about literary creation mingling biography, aesthetic essay and thoughts about the novelistic style.
Life of the American writer George Yermo forms an extraordinary romantic material. Georgi Nikolaev-Yermo was born in 1914 in St. Petersburg into a family of the Russian nobles. He was raised in New Salem, MA, under the sign of Melville, Emily Dickinson and Henry James (all three New Englanders) and Puritan values of the US Founding Fathers. After graduating from University, he’s experienced an unhappy love affair, and went to the Spanish Civil War as a reporter. His battlefield articles made him famous.
In the early fifties, an accidental visit to the palace Sanseverino in Venice changes a course of Yermo’s life, as he suddenly recognizes a materialization of the house from his childhood dreams. The palace, its past and its secrets, and its beautiful owner Lisa, will from now on be the center of his life.
Buida’s Yermo is a broad reflection about literary fiction, and a beautiful homage to Vladimir Nabokov. The book is written in rich, abundant language, and contains protagonist’s (and author’s) views of art in general, of painting, theater and film, of philosophy and aesthetics, and of Russian and American literature. But it is the fascinating originality of its main character that makes Buida’s novel a real reading delicatessen.
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