Sasha Sokolov's amazing Between Dog and Wolf has just been released in Japan by Kawade Shobo Shinsha publishing house as 犬と狼のはざまで.
Featured titles
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The Colonel Myasoedov Affair, a novel by Józef Mackiewicz
Original Polish title: SPRAWA PUŁKOWNIKA MIASOJEDOWA
Rights status: available for all languages less Polish and French.
Published by: France - NOIR SUR BLANC, Polish - Świderski, Wydawnictwo Klubów Mysli Robotniczej "Baza", Kontra; German - J. Pfeiffer; Spanish - Luis de Carait
The plot of The Colonel Myasoyedov Affair (1962) concerns the fate of Colonel Myasoyedov, a rather ordinary employee of the Russian state and private entrepreneur, who gets caught up in a complex web of events involving Russian-German spying activities, internecine battles between factions within the Okhrana (Russian secret police), and escalating tension between Germany and Russia as they work up towards the Great War. Eventually, Myasoyedov is accused of spying – via rumour, innuendo and disinformation – and is sentenced to death, partly on anti-Semitic grounds: he has been involved with a Jewish company which does shipping business between Germany and Russia, and has been protected by an aristocratic patron within the intelligence services, who is an anti-anti-Semite. (One of the more fascinating scenes in the novel is a description of a pogrom in Kiev in 1905, and all the different interests involved in stoking it, and stopping its course.) Once Myasoyedov is executed (in 1915), the novel's point of view shifts to his widow, Clara, who finds herself pursued by the rumours about her husband all the way up to WWII, and who eventually decides to flee the Soviet sphere with her second husband, and ends up witnessing the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. It is a kind of Russian "Dreyfuss affair", but much more interesting and with a larger historical panorama.
"Mackiewicz is a first-rate writer, with a wonderful sense of character, a gift for dialogue, and a strong narrative instinct. ... He has a deeply informed historical intelligence, and a powerful sense of the hidden connections between causes of events, and their sometimes much later consequences. The writing is marked by an appealing naturalness, as it moves from scenes of personal life and relationships, and the broader political and historical panorama." -- Eva Hoffman, the author of Lost in Translation
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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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