Featured titles
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BEFORE AND DURING, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: China - PEKING UNIVERSITY PRESS, France - PHÉBUS, Italy - VOLAND, Serbia - UTOPIA, World English - DEDALUS
Set in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal surroundings on a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past. The novel invokes real historical events and people (Tolstoy, Madame de Staël, Saint John of Kronstadt, Alexander Scriabin, and Stalin, among others), swirling them into a phantasmagoric alternative chronology. Stories germinate within other stories, unfolding in astonishing variations.
We meet Leo Tolstoy’s twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother’s womb, only to be born as Tolstoy’s ‘son’; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Staël who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass palanquin and becomes Fyodorov’s lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who preaches to Lenin on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies – all described in a serious, steady voice – Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God.
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Churov and Churbanov, a novel by Ksenia Buksha
Rights sold: Russia - AST
Shortlisted for the 2020 Big Book Award
Churov and Churbanov is a classic Petersburg tale in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Gogol, and the city’s atmosphere is palpable in every scene. The book is also a family drama; a riff on the Gothic theme of the double; a laugh-out-loud adventure novel; a sly triumph of speculative fiction; an elegy on growing up (and old); and a portrait of two familiar types: the awkward, hard-working nice guy (Churov, a pediatric cardiologist) and the life-of-the-party woman magnet (Churbanov, a two-bit wheeler-dealer). Their dissimilar lives begin to entwine after they discover their hearts beat in unison. This seemingly pointless synchrony has a side effect: a pair like them can sync other people’s heartbeats to their own, thus saving the lives of patients with serious heart conditions. But there’s a downside: when one of the original pair dies, all those whose heartbeats the pair synchronized die, too. Churov and Churbanov must follow their hearts, so to speak, in deciding what role their arbitrary gift will play for those around them. Buksha proves we depend on each other more than we realize, and we can save (or destroy) lives even if our hearts don’t beat as one.
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Please check Anne O. Fisher's page for a sample translation and media reviews dedicated to Churov and Churbanov in English: https://www.anneofisher.com/ksenia-buksha
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