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In Love with a Pencil, essays by Sasha Okun (NF)
Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO
The book was created as a textbook on pencil drawing techniques for beginners and professionals, but it is in fact something much more broad and interesting than just a manual on drawing. It is rather a manual on artistic perception of reality.
"All great masters of the past regardless of their main craft, be it sculpture or painting, were great draftsmen: Rubens, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Moore, Rodin... Drawing is the foundation, the cornerstone of any visual art. There's an endless amount of books and manuals about the art of drawing. Among them, there are bad, good, and very good ones. The question is, why write yet one more? The fact is that regardless of their quality, all of these books answer the question "how"? Some of them are even entitled "How to draw a portrait (landscape, model, still life, hands, etc.)." However, in my humble opinion...
Read moreInhabitants of the Funny Cemetery, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2019)
Rights sold: Estonia - VARRAK, Russia - EKSMO
Winner of the 2019 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery is a panoramic novel which vividly brings to life the worlds of three generations of Russian émigrés in Paris. To recap, the Russian emigration began with the October Revolution and continued apace for two decades, meaning that by the start of the Second World War almost 80,000 Russians had established themselves in France. Paris quickly became the capital of the Russian emigration, not to be replaced by New York until the middle of the century.
The novel contains multiple voices, including three first-person protagonists, whose voices start to overlap, to intertwine, and set off unexpected echoes. The novel’s main narrator is the Soviet émigré Viktor Lipatov (not necessarily his real name), a former dissident who spent several years in psychiatric detention, fled to America, and then arrived...
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