Featured titles
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THE LYING YEAR, a novel by Andrei Gelasimov
Rights sold: Bulgaria - ENTHUSIAST, France - ACTES SUD, Russia - OGI, Slovenia - Modrijan, World English - AMAZON CROSSING
Could have been the blown business deal with the Italians. Could have been the unauthorized office party, which ended with the cops—and then an arrest. No matter what finally got him fired, Mikhail never expected to find himself at Red Star Industries’ office again.
So down-and-out Mikhail is surprised to be called in by old boss, who offers Mikhail easy money and the Land Rover of his dreams to teach his son, Sergei, how to “be a man”—and to spy on him.
Of course, Sergei’s not the Internet-obsessed recluse his father believes. He’s hiding a relationship with the beautiful Marina, who Mikhail himself can’t help but fall for as well. To keep it all together, Mikhail finds himself lying to Petrovich about his son’s activities, lying to Marina about Sergei’s intentions, and lying to Sergei about his love for Marina. So when Sergei’s father invites them all to Italy, the web of lies holding their world together begins to fall apart, and about the time Mikhail finds himself held hostage at gunpoint, he realizes he’s gotten in way over his head…
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Russian Marmalade, collected plays by Ludmila Ulitskaya (2005)
Rights sold: France - GALLIMARD, Germany - HENSCHEL, Russia - EKSMO, AST
Collection of plays for theater ("Russian Marmalade", "My Grandson Benjamin", and "The Seven Saints from Bruho Village").
Russian Marmalade is a play clearly created in dialogue with Anton Chekhov’s «Cherry Orchard». The play’s heroes live in the same kind of old house with the same cherry trees growing all around, only the cherries themselves get made into jam to be sold to provide the owners of the home with their sole means of survival. It is the end of the twentieth century and Russia has changed course yet again as the old system crumbles.
None of the doors close and the electricity does not always work, but mobile phones are busy ringing all the time. The sentimental Chekhovian girl in this play, it turns out, works round the clock for an erotic phone line, unsuspected, it seems, by her respectable parents. This time it is not old monarchist Russia that is crumbling, but the Soviet regime as it gives way to the Yeltsin years. The “new Russians” sell and resell their parents’ dacha, and the parents, pushed onto the sidelines of life, don’t know where to turn anymore. These unhappy tales are infused with philosophical dread and deep psychological analysis. Ulitskaya tells her tales as only she knows how – in a comic, almost grotesque tone, turning a melancholy play with a Chekhovian plot into a bright and buoyant comedy.
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