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Poison and Honey, a novel by Yuri Buida (2014)
Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Russia - EKSMO, Serbia - GEOPOETIKA
Shortlisted for the 2014 Ivan Belkin literary award
Yuri Buida’s Poison and Honey is a modern Russian family saga that focuses on a house and a family, the Osorins, covering lives, ambitions, and deaths, including murder most foul. Buida manages to weave together what sometimes feels like legions of characters and an entire history book of world culture, creating a compact, packed story that’s realistic, mythical, and metaphysical. It’s also strangely enjoyable and even more strangely suspenseful.
Buida’s first-person narrator is Semyon Semyonovich, who’s not, by blood, an Osorin but who becomes part of the extended family when his grandfather, a physician’s assistant, brings him to the Osorins’ house as a little boy. The house, which is set on a hill, is sometimes known as the House of the Twelve Angels. The house is magnificent, and it contains...
Read moreCROSS-POLLINATION (TIME, PLACE, PEOPLE), collected essays by Vladimir Sharov
Rights sold: Russia - ARSIS BOOKS
This volume, published posthumously, was compiled when Sharov already acutely sensed his own end. Of its thirteen entries, one is on literature (Platonov, “without whom and outside of whom our twentieth cen-tury will never be understood”) and four on Russian history; these final five entries supplement earlier themes. But the first half of the book is urgently new. The author is embedded in every word. It is autobiographical, however, only in Sharov’s modest and decentered sense of a memoir: not a Bildungsroman focused on his own coming-of-age, but horizontal, anecdotal, literally a cross-pollination at the level of small living things.
At the radiant center of these remembrances is his father, Aleksandr Izrailevich Sharov (né Nyurenberg), who began as a geneticist, switched to journalism in the late1930s, and finally took refuge in literature. The essays then spread outward in space and time to Sharov’s early neighborhood...
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