Featured titles
-
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)
Read more... -
Aquarius over Odessa, a novel by Ilya Mitrofanov (1992)
Rights sold: Germany - Volk und Welt, Spain - Lumen
"Unfortunately, AQUARIUS OVER ODESSA will remain the author's final work; the tragic accident that took his life in 1994 has deprived Russian literature of one of its more promising talents." -- Joseph P. Mozur Jr., World Literature Today
The astrological sign of change, Aquarius, bodes neither peace nor goodwill for Mitrofanov's blue-collar hero Semyon Stavraki, a deep-sea diver working in the rough and bustling port of Odessa. Stavraki, an orphan raised in the ruins of postwar Odessa, claims the city as his mother and proudly credits her with having taught him honesty, respect, and tolerance for others. Nevertheless, Stavraki's story illustrates how bad things can befall good people, and his fortunes take a disastrous turn precisely when the star sign appears over the city.
The first-person narrative opens with Stavraki's homecoming from a prison camp in the north of Russia. He tells his life story to a fellow passenger on die train home, a situation reminiscent of that in Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata. As the train draws nearer to the hero's beloved Odessa, the tale picks up intensity, and the idyllic portrayal of Stavraki's love and marriage to a waitress suddenly gives way to a tragic chain of events culminating in his trial and prison sentence for murder.
Stavraki's tale is in many ways an extended metaphor -- life is a plunge into the depths. As the novel progresses, Mitrofanov's hero becomes more and more convincing and real, as do the circumstances in which he lives in the post-Soviet era.
Read more...