Pavel Lembersky – Odesa is not on the Hudson

new representation

stories about vanished and destroyed Odesa

Odesa, as we know, is currently under attack (almost daily), like so many Ukrainian cities. Pavel Lembersky’s collection of stories ODESA IS NOT ON THE HUDSON is paying tribute to the city rich in world-recognized literary tradition: chatty, irreverent, humorous, exuberant, ironic, whimsical. God knows, the irrepressible Odesans need that vibe in these dark times more than ever. But so does the world at large.

«Imagine Borges writing philosophical conceptual anecdotes using the sparkling language of Isaac Babel. Sometimes the significant parts are located in the breaks between phrases, and one can feel the draft of pain and despair blowing from those gaps which perhaps irony alone can suppress.» ANTON NESTEROV

Leonid Yuzefovich – Hike To Bar-Khoto

new award

Yasnaya Polyana Award 2024

In Leonid Yuzefovich’s latest and again award winning book, he brings history back to life by again empathizing with the mind of a historically authentic figure. These are the fictional but based on real events memoirs of the Russian officer, Captain Solodovnikov, who served as a military adviser in the Mongolian army in 1912–1914, when the Mongols defended their independence from China. The book intertwines the siege of the Chinese-occupied fortress of Bar-Khoto with love for the wife of a Russian diplomat in Mongolia, the First World War and Solodovnikov’s deportation from Leningrad to Transbaikalia in the mid-1930s. The hero rethinks his own life and, with it, the fate of a person in a critical epoch.