Featured titles
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The Three Fat Men, a novel by Yuri Olesha
Rights sold / Published by (rights may be available): Bulgaria - Hermes, China - Youth and Children Publishing Company, Czech Republic - Svět Sovětů, France - Éditions Hier et Aujourd'hui, Greece - Kedros, Hungary - Magvető, Móra, Italy - Einaudi, Japan - Kodansha, Poland - Książka i Wiedza, Romania - Editura Ion Creangă, English - Hesperus Press
The novel was written for both children and adults. It is a story set in an unknown land about an uprising led by the gunsmith Prospero. (The name is an allusion to the magician in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.) The novel has the didactic and schematic qualities of a fairy tale and is filled with unexpected metaphors and dexterously shifting points of view. In The Three Fat Men Olesha displays the same mastery of style present in Envy and his short stories.
Olesha's The Three Fat Men is of one of the finest, most overlooked works of Soviet-era literature. At once a peculiarly hilarious satire full of magic and whimsy, it is also a beautifully written work of literature, brimming with profound metaphors and brilliant turns of phrase. This is a "fairy tale" ostensibly written for children, but which will be even more appreciated by grown-ups. - Russian Life magazine
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Kira Georgievna, a novel by Victor Nekrasov (1961)
Published by: Croatia - Svjetlost (1963); Czech Republic - SNKLU (1962); Denmark - Kbh (1962); France - Seuil (1963); Germany - Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt (1962), Ullstein Verlag (1981); Italy - Einaudi (1961); Israel - משרד הבטחון; Poland - Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (1961); Slovakia - Slovenské vydavatelstvo krásnej literatúry (1962); Spain - Editorial Mateu (1962); UK - Cresset Press (1963), Cambridge University Press (1967); USA - Pantheon Books (1962),
Set in 1960's Russia, the novel tells the story of Kira Georgievna, a middle-aged successful sculptor, passively married to Nikolai, a much older painter. Each completely engrossed in their work, they become entirely emotionally detached from one another. At this point we meet Vadim, the man Kira was engaged to marry twenty-five years earlier. Their plan was destroyed upon Vadim's arrest by the Solviet police, which earned him a twenty-year sentence in Siberia. Now married with a five-year-old son, his curiosity leads him back to Kira. They fall in love all over again and plan to start a new life, but complications naturally arise when they realize the sacrifices that must be made in order to be together.
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