Featured titles
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Confessions of a Young Novelist, 2011
Rights sold: Russia - Corpus, Estonia - Tanapaev,
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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.
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RETURN TO EGYPT, a novel by Vladimir Sharov
Winner of the 2014 Big Book Award
Winner of the 2014 The Crown award
Winner of the 2014 Russian Booker and Student Booker awardsRights sold: Macedonia - DRUZHINA, Russia - AST, Serbia - ROSSIKA
The novel depicts a Soviet agronomist by the name of Nikolai Gogol, who is a descendent of the great Russia writer by the same name. Throughout the novel, Nikolai attempts to write a sequel to the classic novel Dead Souls. The book, however, is not about Gogol; it instead follows the journey of Soviet generations whose lives are inextricably linked to the Bible’s Book of Exodus, hence the novel’s title. The novel has sold over 45,000 copies of books in Russian alone. In 2014, Sharov was awarded the Russian Booker and the Big Book award for the novel. Critically, the novel was a huge success as Sharov was praised for his unique and poetic plot. For example, according to the literary critic Natalia Kurchatova: “the author works at the junction of histography and religious-mystical perception of reality” to create a deeply complex and reflexive novel.
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