Inga Kuznetsova – Intervals

new representation

anti/utopia where all beings are gifted with consciousness

In Inga Kuznetsova’s novel INTERVALS, a near-future dystopian version of Russia, a special powder is used to destroy poetry books in libraries, poets are killed, and a Nobel Prize-winning poet is secretly kidnapped by government agents. The state has outlawed poets and poetry.

The reader is drawn into a cruel, convincingly naturalistic, and hauntingly surreal story of resistance where poets are supported by animals and objects which are also soulful beings gifted with consciousness. We hear them all narrate the story in a multiplicity of perspectives. As the tension between state and poetry builds to a bloody climax, the poet and his followers discover that nothing truly dies… The anti-utopia transforms into a utopia.

 

Aleksei Nikitin – Bat-Ami

new representation

true story of a ukrainian-jewish box champion in the turmoils of World War II

In his new novel Aleksei Nikitin is telling the unique and touching true story of the famous boxer Goldinov who, after the German invasion of Ukraine, joins the partisan fighters in the forests behind the front line. Only by lucky coincidence does he survive and he joins the regular army as a soldier before being sent by the Ukrainian secret service on a life-threatening mission to Kiev occupied by the Nazis. Meanwhile Goldvinov‘s wife falls ill during evacuation and is separated from her daughter Bat-Ami.

Unique is the perspective – the attack of the Germans seen through the eyes of a boxer and assimilated Jew.

Grigori Kanovich – Devilspel

new publication

Macedonian translation published by Prozart

The novel is set during the tragic few weeks in June-July 1941, when the German army in a sudden attack defeated the Red Army and within a few days occupied Lithuania. Grigori Kanovich’s writing is informed by his deep native knowledge of the Lithuanian countryside where he grew up in the 1930s, but he is no less intimately familiar with the Russian and Jewish cultures. Yet his real interest as a writer is in exploring the fundamental and universal ethical conflict between good and evil, which transcends the limits of concrete space and time.

«DEVILSPEL is a moving and elegant novel of fine character portraits, told in restrained but beautiful prose, set in a small town in Lithuania at a watershed moment of history, when ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust enter the lives of the local Jews and non-Jews alike, dividing neighbours and families into persecuted and persecutors.»
ROSIE GOLDSMITH, Chair of the Judges EBRD Literature Prize