Aleksei Slapovski – passed away

sad news

Aleksei Slapovski passed away

We are very sorry to announce that author Aleksei Slapovski recently died at the age of 65.

The very first license contract concluded by Thomas Wiedling for a novel by a Russian author – even before the agency was officially founded – happened in 1998: ANKETA – THE QUESTIONNAIRE by Aleksei Slapovski.

More novels in translation followed. Just recently the agency was able to conclude a deal for a feature film based on a theatre play by Slapovski.

Also Slapovski was one of those authors who did not hesitate to speak out against Putin’s aggressive war in Ukraine. When it became too dangerous to openly publish critical texts in Russia about this war and about Putin, Slapovski started to use a pen name.

The trusting relationship with Slapovski had developed into a friendship over the course of 25 years. We have lost an author who never lost his sense of humor. I have lost a friend.

Aleksei Ivanov – Heart of Taiga in CZ

new publication

Czech edition published by Host

Aleksei Ivanov’s historical novel HEART OF PARMA is epic, romantic, lush, brutal and wrenchingly mystical: history blends seamlessly with invention, new religion with native magic, passion with death. It is a heady, superbly involving entertainment with battles and churches, captives and cruci- fixions, pagan temples and human sacrifice, princes and traitors, women who turn into wolves and men who are cursed to live forever. It is, at heart, the tale of conquest and clashing civilizations.

Seasonal greetings – COURAGE

«Courage is the readiness to accept with dignity the consequences of bravery. Courage is the long-term struggle for results. For us, courage is now more important than bravery, because the situation will not be overcome with bravery. It requires courage – to live with all of what is going on and not run away, not close one’s eyes under any circumstances, to notice, see and remember. And to do something.»
VIKTOR MARTINOVICH

It feels strange to wish a relaxing holiday and a Happy New Year 2023 when, at the same moment, one can read in the press about a very likely new winter attack in a war in the middle of Europe. An attack against Ukraine most likely also from Belorussian territory. A war against Western values as we understood but with real people dying in Ukraine.

Not only at Christmas Ukrainian citizens are sitting in the dark, in the cold and often in bomb shelters. Belorussian citizens who don’t agree are sitting in jail. Some Russian citizens who spoke out against are sitting in jail or being forced into exile. And books are being removed from shelves.

New Year is close but peace seems far away. So with the words of Belorussian author Viktor Martinovich I am wishing us all «courage». In his novel NIGHT it is courage that makes the hero leave home and go out into the dark with his dog in the hope of finally reaching the light.

Sincerely, Thomas Wiedling

Olga Slavnikova – The Immortal in Romanian

new publication

Romanian translation published by Epica

A bed ridden Soviet veteran is being looked after by his wife and daughter. Long may he live, the family is surviving on his pension. The two women create a virtual world for him in his room, cut him off from all sources of information and play him news-broadcasts reporting on the latest communist party conferences recorded on video. All this to convince the old man of the continued existence of his beloved Soviet Union.

The sujet of Olga Slavnikova’s novel THE IMMORTAL was initially about the end of the Soviet Union. But with Putin’s nowadays dreams to bring back the Russian empire this novel becomes a new symbolic meaning.

 

Dmitri Danilov – Sasha, hello for Serbia

new sale

Serbian language rights sold to Sluzhbeni Glasnik

This new novel SASHA, HELLO by Dmitri Danilov with distopian character moves right on the edge of the real situation in Russia. Death penalty was recently introduced as part of a project to humanize the penal system for crimes where society has no real sense of wrongdoing. Consensual sex with minors is included. However, the execution of the death penalty was humanized to the maximum. The prison is now called Combinat, you live like in a luxury hotel. Executions are no longer carried out by executioners. Instead, a warden has recently taken you out for a walk every day through the same hallway, where one fine day you will be torn to pieces by a salvo of an automatic machine gun. This can happen in three days or in thirty years. As algorithm would have it.

The main character of the book, Sergei, is reminiscent of all the key figures of the most famous anti-utopias at once, from D-503 to Josef K., but the conditions in which he is placed have never been told in such a way.

Double awarded by non-governmental institutions: Book of the Year 2022 (by Russian publisher’s community) and Yasnaya Polyana Award 2022 (sponsored by Samsung)

Olga Slavnikova – The Jump for China

new sale

Chinese translation rights sold to Beijing Publishing Group

Contrary to expectations, the novel THE JUMP by living classic author Olga Slavnikova is neither empathic nor critical about the difficulty of being disabled in Russian society. Also it is neither idyllic nor tragic, it has no contradicting truth and lies, but instead illustrates the clash of many different truths meeting on the solid ground of harsh reality.

“An angry Nabokov.“ Literaturnaya Gazeta

This novel has been multi-awarded in 2018: Big Book Award shortlist, Yasnaya Polyana Award, Book of the Year (publishers at Moscow International Book Fair), National Bestseller Award shortlist

Mikhail Khodorkovsky – How to Slay a Dragon

new representation

a manual for start-up revolutionaries

Isn’t this one of the most pressing questions of our times? How can a totalitarian regime be put to an end? By whom? From the inside or from the outside? After that, who would come to power? And what would that power look like? And what should that power look like?

Far from any know-it-all attitude, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s book HOW TO SLAY A DRAGON poses questions, uncomfortable questions that have been avoided in the West up to now, such as non-violence/ violence against a totalitarian ruler acting aggressively both internally and externally. Using the example of Russia Khodorkovsky derives the resulting options for action. The book does not want to provide recipes but to initiate a discussion overdue.

In its pamphlet-like gesture, the text is very reminiscent of Stéphane Hessel‘s „Time for Outrage!“ and is therefore available in a special short version with 65 pages.

Both short and unabridged version fully available in English for proof reading.

Darya Bobyleva – The Big UMR in Poland

new sale

short story to be published in Nowa Fantastyka/ Poland

The Big UMR is a chapter from Darya Bobyleva’s horror novel THE COURTYARD ON THE BRINK OF MIDNIGHT. Nowa Fantastyka is the most renown Polish monthly fantasy and scifi magazine (Andrzej Sapkowski published his first short story in the magazine).

«A real “Russian horror book”: joyless, full of despair and tenderness … The novel is a whole, but it consists of many parts, and each part, each individual element, can be viewed for a long time and reread several times. Images from different times that twist and enchant in a kaleidoscope of events… There are no limits to despair and death… Impossible to tear yourself away from the book.» DARK

Aleksei Ivanov – 3 book deal for China

new sales

1 fiction novel and 2 nonfiction titles sold to Neo-Cogito/ China

FICTION by Aleksei Ivanov
THE GEOGRAPHER DRANK THE GLOBE – In the Russian province of the 90s a young teacher fights with the children of the new generation. He has been assigned to the most rebellious class. The „geography teacher“ and the teenagers, who are ready to break him, first sit in the walls of the classroom, but then outside the walls they together experience an adventure of comradeship and initiation.

„Geographer“ pumps new blood into the channels of emotional perception through literature and lets many readers again – lite- rally as the first time – feel very simple and familiar things: winter, love, wind, trust, lone- liness, the smell of cigarette smoke, the taste of vodka, the headache of a hangover.“ GALINA YUZEFOVICH

NONFICTION by Aleksei Ivanov
1) THE MINING CIVILIZATION – The economic potential of mining equipment gave rise to a new and unprecedented cultu- ral phenomenon, dubbed by 20th-century sociologists as the „mining civilization.“ This is a variant of the Russian world, but with a special value system, with a special mythology, with special culture heroes. And the identity of Russian mining and metallurgy, which is also the identity of the Urals, turned out to be the benchmark for its industrialization.

2) RIDGE OF RUSSIA – Russians have settled in the Urals for half a millennium, but also the Urals the Urals have been fitting the immigrants for five centuries. Thus arose in the Urals quite an amazing world, unlike the Russian one, with a complex set of local ideas about nature and man. In everyday life it is difficult to understand how the Urals differ from Russia ¬ and yet remain Russia. In any case, the fact is that the world of the Urals is not an alternative to the Russian world, but one of its versions.

Viktor Martinovich – MOVA for Latvia

new sale

Latvian translation rights sold to Prometejs

Viktor Martinovich’s mind crushing novel about Minsk in the year 2044, when it became a provincial town in the north-west of the United States of China and Russia. Family and love are considered to be out-dated concepts, spiritual needs are fulfilled by consuming and advertising. Despite draconian punishments a particular drug somehow and repeatedly manages to get into the country: MOVA. Anyone who reads the mova note, hardly understands a word, but experiences a wonderfully euphoric high. Chinese triads, Belarusian underground insurgents and the national narcotics control office are tangled up in a drug war. Or is there more to it than meets the eye?

«MOVA is funny. MOVA is sad. MOVA is full of surprises. It is bizarre, it is a thriller, a nightmare – and intoxicating. A powerfully un-cut drug in the form of a book, a fix of which can only be heartily recommended.»
Deutschlandradio Kultur