Every week we'll publish a short book review. We believe literature can provide a necessary perspective for today's world. New releases or old ones, fiction or nonfiction—in this section, you'll find books we want to share with you because we consider them important.
Victor Pelevin "Cool"
"Even a forester doesn't know what happens in the forest at night. And the brain isn't just a forest. It's a mysterious jungle. And it's not necessarily ours."
Nikolay Kukushkin “One palm clap”
“If we perceive the brain as matter, moved by information through time, then the very concept of consciousness changes and all questions disappear.”
Hannah Arendt, "People in Dark Times"
"'Dark Times'… are not identical to the monstrosities of our age, which are marked by a terrifying novelty. Dark Times, on the contrary, are not only not new, they are by no means rare in history…"
Edmund de Waal, "The Hare with Amber Eyes: The Hidden Legacy"
"Netsuke is a small, sharp flash of precision. And therefore, it deserves an equally precise approach."
Peter Flamm "Me?"
“I’m at the door, I open it, it’s pitch dark, there’s no one there, maybe I’m imagining things, maybe it’s just the hot blood rushing in my ears, or mines from the battle, or maybe I’m dead…”
Cormac McCarthy "Suttree"
"That year there were locusts. They howled in the green trees like panthers, floundering in hundreds on the face of the river."
Vera Polozkova "Lost and Found"
start rewinding: the house takes out the flame and grows back like a candle, a person is assembled from a shell and broken brick, a plane swallows missiles, we get up from the floor to have breakfast without rolling or screaming
Mikhail Eisenberg, "Don't Touch Us: Poems"
This world, growing wild before our eyes, was guarded by our meekness and our anger. On the scales at home, we weighed what remained and what we had failed to achieve.
William Faulkner, "Light in August"
«Он кричал, что имеет право убить нигера. Почему – не сказал, до того распалился и ополоумел, что говорить не мог толком».
Jesmyn Ward, "Sing, Ye Restless, Sing"
"I wash my hands every day, Jojo. But the damn blood never comes off. I put my hands to my face and I can smell it under my skin."
David Lynch, Christina McKenna "The Dream Room"
"I remember mostly summer because winter meant school, and we human beings block out memories of school because they are terrible."
Walter Isaacson "Elon Musk"
"Musk quickly became bored at Queens. The university was wonderful, but he didn't have to work hard in class."
Marina and Sergey Dyachenko "Vita Nostra: Collecting the Pieces"
“From a submissive fool who does not grow up, who does not overcome himself, the Word will never emerge…”
Asya Volodina "Protagonist"
Asya Volodina, "Protagonist" - Moscow: AST, 2022. It's hard to say whether Asya Volodina's book is more of a university novel or an ancient Greek tragedy. The setting (the action takes place at the Academy, a prototype…) suggests the former.
Alexander Ilichevsky, "Narrow Sky, Wide River"
"Home for me isn't a country, a state, or a city—it's the plain, the hills, the land, the forests. To understand this, just get out of the car and look into the distance, at the river's curve."
Maria Stepanova "Focus"
Maria Stepanova "Focus" Moscow: Novoye Izdatelstvo, 2024 Maria Stepanova's new book can be classified as both fiction, since it contains artistic invention and a plot, and autofiction, since the heroine is quite recognizable as...
Ellen Newbould La Motte, "On the Ebb Tide of War"
"With skillful surgery and professional care, some of these patients will return home... and become a burden to themselves and to society."
Helena Pobjarzhina "Other Notes"
"You're always getting lost. When you live such a long, monotonous life, you're bound to get lost. You're bound to trip over something trivial."
Timur Valitov "Corner Room"
"I need to wash, air out the room, change my sheets, although all of this is pointless: it won't help at all. This is what will help: to leave, to disappear, to leave not a trace, not a shadow."
Anton Sekisov "Vaginov's Room"
Anton Sekisov, "Vaginov's Room" Moscow: Alpina non-fiction; Bookmate, 2023 If thrillers can be funny, then this is a deafeningly funny thriller that seems to embody all the jokes about madness and…
Samuel Butler, "Erewhon; or, Beyond the Mountains"
"But how incredibly lucky I was! If I had reached the pass five minutes later, the passage between the glaciers would have already been blocked by cloud, and I wouldn't have even known it existed."
Bram Stoker's "The Mystery of the Sea"
“Everything was calm—so supernaturally calm that the rare sounds grated on the ear.”
Oksana Kirillova "Viland"
"Submission, elevated to the rank of virtue, is the essence and foundation of a dictatorial state that will destroy us all."
Ivan Filippov "Mouse"
"For the first few hours of the epidemic, television was silent or lying, as usual. No emergency broadcasts—only news of stability and peace."
Andrey Yurganov, "Soviet Literature and Stalin (20s – Early 30s)"
“To become a proletarian writer, one must not only be one by birth, but also master dialectics…”
Alexey Konakov "Tabia Thirty-Two"
"Chess is our cultural code, what unites us all, what keeps society, people, and country from falling apart, what makes us us."
Robert Pearcey, "Reading as a Philosophical Practice"
"The ordinary reader is not just one who reads, but one who leads the life of a reader."
Dmitry Zakharov, "Bridge Protection Committee"
"At first, the arrest of the schoolchildren seemed like a big deal. Then the bridge thing... And then—nothing. Beetroot prices have gone up, have you heard?"
Yuri Buida “The Gift of Speech”
"The era of the unavenged was beginning. The flow of time raged like speech searching for meaning, and my mother could easily have been lost in this flow, falling victim to a dark god whose existence many suspected."
Vera Bogdanova, "Seven Ways to Salt Souls"
"Will he see the White Maiden if he turns around? A glimmer of light in her wide-open eyes, veiled in milk, two dots in the dense forest darkness."
Adelaide Gertsyk "Unreasonable"
“She felt sorry for the pencil and the book, she knew that they could be bored on one table and happy on another, she knew that she needed to help them in their dark, oppressed life.”
Susan Sontag, "Under Stress"
“Intellectuals who take sides with full responsibility, who go beyond their principles to the forefront (and not just sign petitions), are much rarer than intellectuals who publicly praise false ideals…
Shamil Idiatullin “It’s too late to be afraid”
"Everyone already understood everything, but Tinatin absolutely had to say it out loud. She frowned and didn't even ask, but simply stated: 'So, we're all already dead.'"
Asya Demishkevich "Once a boy, twice a boy"
“It was just the way it was, Andrey always lost something: keys, money, teeth, time, homework, his mother.”
Gleb Shulpyakov, "Batyushkov is not sick"
"On June 6, 1828, a carriage arrived at the gates of the Sonnenstein Mental Hospital in Pirna, Germany. It had been specially brought to the clinic's entrance…"
Lana Bastashic "Catch a Hare"
“Can you imagine, I’ll say, one of my friends from Bosnia calls me today and asks… I pick up words in a foreign language, knit them and twist the loops in such a way that not a ray of light can get through…
Oksana Vasyakina "Rose"
"When she was born, she was brought to the sixth-floor apartment and placed in a crib. A few years later, a fold-out sofa was installed in the crib's place, and Svetlana began sleeping on it. When the sofa became completely unusable, its place was taken by...
Mikhail Epstein and Sergei Yuryenen, "Climaxes: On the Vicissitudes of Life"
"How strange it is to feel the dusty deposits of centuries right under my skin! Where are you from? I was born in Atlantis. I was born in Byzantium. I was born in the USSR... Exotic words—echoes of the already silent..."
Alexey Tsvetkov, "Quinn Idylls and Other Things"
"One day you'll wake up confused // about who you are and how you got here // the main thing here is not to get completely confused // not to spread like liquid gel across the surface"
Marina Abramovic, Walk Through Walls: An Autobiography
"I never played with dolls. I never wanted dolls. I didn't like toys at all. I preferred to play with the shadows of cars on the wall or the beam of light from the window."