Love and Lament - Other Press

OTHER PRESS/RIGHTS GUIDE
Love and Lament
a novel
JOHN MILLIKEN THOMPSON

OTHER PRESS
INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS GUIDE
MISSION STATEMENT
OTHER PRESS publishes literature from
America and around the world that repre-
sents writing at its best. We feel that the
art of storytelling has become paramount
today in challenging readers to see and
think differently. We know that good
stories are rare to come by: they should
retain the emotional charge of the best
classics while speaking to us about what
matters at present, without complacency
or self-indulgence. Our list is tailored and
selective, and includes everything from
top-shelf literary fiction to cutting-edge
nonfiction—whether it’s political, social,
or cultural—as well as a small collection
of groundbreaking professional titles.
Judith Gurewich
Publisher
OTHER PRESS

JULIAN BORGER
IN PURSUIT OF MONSTERS
Fifty years after the Nuremberg trials, the worst genocidal
atrocities in Europe since World War II took place during the
Balkan Wars, when thousands of Bosnian minorities were
massacred. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) was formed in 1993, at the height of the
wars, to bring justice to those who committed crimes against
humanity, and created a list of 161 war criminals.
Initially the ICTY was controversial, underfunded, and
largely unrecognized—the major powers wanted to obtain
justice, yet no one was willing to get their hands dirty.
Eventually, because of the relentlessness of the prosecutors,
diplomats, and investigators of the ICTY, they received support
from the British government, and a team of SAS agents was
dispatched into the Balkans, on a manhunt that would last for
more than a decade.
Grippingly reconstructed by The Guardian’s diplomatic
editor, Julian Borger, In Pursuit of Monsters investigates the
heroes, villains, and wider international repercussions of the
Bosnian genocide and its aftermath—from war criminals who
perfectly embody the banality of evil, to determined ICTY
investigators working on a shoestring budget, to politicians and
diplomats who radically changed their own foreign policies.
JULIAN BORGER was born in London
in 1961. He is The Guardian’s diplomatic
editor and writes its Global Security
blog. He has covered more than a dozen
wars, including the Bosnian conflict,
while living in Sarajevo from 1994 to
1997. He joined The Guardian in 1993
from the BBC, after several years as a
radio and television reporter in Africa,
and has been a US correspondent for
The Guardian since 1998.
FALL 2014
Pages: 300 approx.
Rights: World
NONFICTION
Agent: The Wylie Agency, Sarah Chalfant
(schalfant@wylieagency.co.uk)
OTHER PRESS • 2

ELIZABETH COHEN
THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL
What happens when an aspiring actress meets an Icelandic
yak farmer on a matchmaking website? Or when an online
forum for cancer support turns into a love triangle between
an English professor, a Canadian fisherman, and a teacher
living in Japan?
The characters in this short-story collection, The Hypo-
thetical Girl, are ordinary, dissatisfied, and desperate to fall in
love. They meet on the Internet under fictitious personas, flirt
through e-mails and text messages while restlessly engag-
ing in the age-old dilemma of finding a suitable lover. These
stories capture the humor and horror of Internet dating, with
all if its posturing, deceptions, and complications. In “The
Man Who Made Whirligigs,” Whimsy999 and Vivacious002
exchange flirtatious online banter, and despite their obvious
differences—he’s an older Jewish man who makes and sells
whirligigs; she’s a Latina hairdresser—they plan to meet for
lunch at a local farmers’ market in New Mexico. Their meeting
unfolds with the anticipation, mystery, and stupor of a magic
show or, well, a blind date.
The Hypothetical Girl is a convincing, hilarious, and heart-
breaking reconfiguration of Pride and Prejudice for the age of
online dating and text messaging.
ELIZABETH COHEN is writer-in-residence at Western Con-
necticut State University’s MFA writing program and an as-
sistant professor of English at Plattsburgh State University.
Her memoir, The Family on Beartown Road (Random House,
2003), was a New York Times Notable Book, and her articles,
stories, and poetry have appeared in Newsweek, People, New
York Times Magazine, Salon, Tablet, and the Yale Review. She
lives in upstate New York with her daughter, Ava.
PRAISE FOR THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL
“Beautiful, funny, and heartbreaking,
Cohen’s stories tackle love and all its
discontents in a way you’ve never
experienced before.”
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times
best-selling author of Pictures of You
PRAISE FOR THE FAMILY ON
BEARTOWN ROAD
“Frank, funny … courageous.”
—New York Times Book Review
“The adventure and peril of everyday living
captured in language that’s light, beautiful,
and razor-sharp.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
RIGHTS SOLD TO THE FAMILY ON
BEARTOWN ROAD
UNITED KINGDOM: Ebury Press
FALL 2013
Pages: 208 approx
Rights: World
FICTION
OTHER PRESS • 3

VINCENT CRAPANZANO
RECAPITULATIONS
How do we remember? Is the act of remembering related
to the creation of a responsive self? How do our memories
resonate with everyday experience? In Recapitulations, author
and distinguished professor Vincent Crapanzano attempts to
answer these questions by reflecting on his personal experi-
ences as an anthropologist, literary theorist, and critic.
At once an autobiography and an ethnographic study,
this book brilliantly explores the author’s life—from his earli-
est memories to thoughts about death—through seemingly
disparate recollections drawn from his wide range of experi-
ences. Crapanzano uses these recollections as a way of ques-
tioning our cultural and psychological assumptions, and in
the process, calls attention to the limits they impose on our
self-understanding, imagination, and interpretations of reality.
Like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques and C. G. Jung’s
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, this unique memoir is a beau-
tifully written guide to the hidden realms of personal memory
and experience.
VINCENT CRAPANZANO is an author and Distinguished
Professor of Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the
CUNY Graduate Center. He has published articles in major
periodicals and academic journals, such as The American An-
thropologist, Les Temps Modernes, Yale Review of Literature,
The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Times Liter-
ary Supplement. His previous books include The Fifth World
of Foster Bennett (Viking, 1977), The Hamadsha (University
of California Press), Tuhami (University of Chicago Press),
Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: Essays on the Epis-
temology of Interpretation (Harvard University Press), Serv-
ing the Word (The New Press, 2000), Imaginative Horizons:
An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology (University of
Chicago Press), and The Harkis: The Wound that Never Heals
(University of Chicago Press).
PRAISE FOR THE HARKIS
“Combining interviews, literary
analysis, and psychoanalytical insights,
Vincent Crapanzano traces the ways
in which betrayal and powerlessness
have played out in the lives of the
Harkis and their children.”
—Times Literary Supplement
PRAISE FOR SERVING THE WORD
“Crapanzano takes the Fundamental-
ists as he finds them and expounds the
manifestations of their literalism without
condescension or contradiction.”
—New York Review of Books
FALL 2014
Pages: 300 approx.
Rights: World
NONFICTION
OTHER PRESS • 4

ADAM FIFIELD
THE IDEALIST: THE STORY OF JIM GRANT, UNICEF,
AND THE SAVING OF 25 MILLION YOUNG LIVES
In 1979, Jim Grant was nominated by President Jimmy
Carter to head UNICEF. During the course of his fifteen
years in office, he made the organization what it is today: he
quadrupled its immunization rates, saved at least 25 million
children by spreading basic care to the widest number of
countries, hired a staff of world-class specialists to “give
UNICEF a brain,” and created programs that continue to
save thousands of lives every single day. Years later, Carter
said that nominating Grant to lead UNICEF was one of his
greatest accomplishments.
At first his staff thought he was crazy and overzealous, but
they came to revere him when they saw his ceaseless effort
and optimism. Grant accomplished through a sheer force of will
what everyone thought was impossible, by tirelessly working
eighteen hours a day, forming truces with political enemies so
that their countries could be immunized, entering dangerous
war zones, and boldly raising awareness and money. The first
biography of Grant with full cooperation from his family and
former colleagues, The Idealist tells the story of a visionary
who broke the rules, prodded or sidestepped the sluggish UN
bureaucracy, and with single-minded determination made the
world a better place.
ADAM FIFIELD was born in Vermont. His journalism has ap-
peared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Village
Voice, Philadelphia Magazine, and The Philadelphia Inquirer,
where he was a staff writer. He is also the author of A Blessing
Over Ashes (William Morrow, 2000), a memoir about his Cam-
bodian foster brother. In 2007, he became the deputy director
of editorial and creative services at the US Fund for UNICEF.
PRAISE FOR A BLESSING OVER ASHES
“A vivid, textured memoir with echoes of
Huckleberry Finn and Sophie’s Choice…
Told with humor and emotion in an
almost cinematic fashion, this fascinating
tale is ideal for a broad range of readers.”
—Kirkus Reviews
FALL 2014
Pages: 320 approx.
Rights: World
NONFICTION
Agent: Larry Weissman Literary, Larry
Weissman (larryweissman@earthlink.net)
OTHER PRESS • 5

CHARLES KAISER
THE COST OF COURAGE
In Paris during World War II, an oppressive mood descend-
ed upon the occupied city—food and fuel were scarce,
street signs suddenly appeared in German, and every day,
Nazi soldiers paraded down the Champs-Elysées. French
citizens had to choose between enduring these humilia-
tions and taking action. The Cost of Courage is about three
siblings, Christiane, Jacqueline, and André Boulloche, who
acted by joining the Resistance. All of them risked their lives
delivering secret messages, rescuing downed British pilots,
and carrying out sabotage.
After the war, despite their heroism, they never spoke
about their experiences with their children—or anyone else—
because “it was necessary to turn the page.” Christiane sev-
ered her connection with all of her friends in the Resistance.
André, who later had a brilliant career in politics until his un-
timely death in a plane crash, was grimly private about the
number tattooed on his forearm. In this work of nonfiction that
reads like a spy-thriller, Charles Kaiser, an engaging historian
and family friend of the Boulloches, narrates the siblings’ brave
action during the war and reveals the tragic reason behind their
silence that lasted half a century.
CHARLES KAISER is an author, journalist, and blogger. He
was born in Washington DC and grew up there and in Albany,
New York; Dakar, Senegal; London, England; and Windsor,
Connecticut. He is a former staff writer for The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. His articles
have also appeared in New York, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The
Washington Post, The Guardian of London, and Vogue, among
many other publications. His previous books, 1968 In America
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) and The Gay Metropolis
(Houghton Mifflin, 1997), remain in print from Grove Press.
PRAISE FOR THE GAY METROPOLIS
“Charles Kaiser aims to convey not
only what happened during the period
but what it felt like at the time…A
summoning up of traumas past, a
lament for paradise lost.”
—New York Times (A New York Times
Notable Book of the Year)
“Brisk, splashy, dishy…Kaiser is a gifted
popular historian who manages to
suggest something of the flavor of gay
life in different decades and to convey
effectively the gradual changes in gay
peoples’ self-images and social status.”
—Washington Post
SPRING 2014
Pages: 300 approx.
Rights: World
NONFICTION
OTHER PRESS • 6

PETER MATTEI
THE DEEP WHATSIS
Meet Eric Nye: hipster, player, philosopher, drunk, sociopath.
Eric is a ruthless and talented young Chief Idea Officer at a
New York City–based ad agency, in charge of downsizing his
department, which entails firing dozens of longtime employ-
ees before their pensions kick in. In his free time, he guzzles
bottles of the finest Sancerre, balances a hodgepodge of
prescription pills, obsesses over his lavish furnishings, and
chases women.
And then one day he meets Intern, who’s name he can’t
remember—it might be Megan or Caitlin or Sari—at a bar in
Bushwick. After a few drunken sexual encounters with her, he
loses his appetite for food—and seems to be losing his mind
too. Is she in love with him, or is she stalking him just to make
trouble? Will she be the cause of his nervous breakdown, or
the cure for his sociopathic tendencies?
A timely meditation on the inherent absurdity of corpo-
ratism and our ubiquitous culture of branding, The Deep
Whatsis follows a brilliant anti-hero’s quest for contemporary
self-identity, with echoes of American Psycho, Cosmopolis,
and Fight Club. It’s a gripping and hilarious satire of hipsters,
consumerism, contemporary art—and anything else that
crosses the narrator’s path—about a lost soul navigating a
toxic corporate world and, against all odds, stumbling toward
redemption.
PETER MATTEI is a writer and director
working in both theater and film, and
has written pilots for HBO and other net-
works. Love in the Time of Money was
his first feature film, which he wrote and
directed. The script was developed at
the Sundance Filmmakers Lab in 1998,
and was inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s
play La Ronde. He lives in Brooklyn.
FALL 2013
Pages: 250 approx.
Rights: World
FICTION
Agent: 3 Arts Entertainment, Richard Abate
(rabate@3arts.com)
OTHER PRESS • 7

SHAHAN MUFTI
THE SCRIBES OF MEMORY
Shahan Mufti’s family history, which he can trace back 1,400
years, offers a unique perspective on the intertwined histories
of Islam and Pakistan. Mufti, born of two families (Mufti and
Qazi) that were both revered guardians of Sharia law in South
Asia for many centuries, tells the story of his lineage to reveal
the deepest roots—real and imagined—of Islamic civilization
in Pakistan as it evolved over the centuries, as well as the deli-
cate nature of Islamic history itself.
Through historical anecdotes, journalistic vignettes, and
autobiography, The Scribes of Memory captures the larger
story of the world’s only state founded in the name of Islam
and the world’s first Islamic democracy, now caught in the
middle of a vicious battle between modernity and tradition.
Mufti’s family story is one thread in the fabric of a larger Islamic
narrative, through which a Western audience can begin to un-
derstand the dynamic forces and historical underpinnings of
the hugely important nation of Pakistan.
SHANAN MUFTI is an assistant pro-
fessor of journalism at the University
of Richmond. He has contributed
pieces on Pakistan and the evolution of
Islam to Harper’s, The Atlantic Month-
ly, The New York Times Magazine,
the Boston Sunday Globe, The Nation,
Bloomberg Businessweek, Columbia
Journalism Review, and many others.
He splits his time between the United
States and Pakistan.
FALL 2013
Pages: 350 approx.
Rights: World
NONFICTION
Agent: Larry Weissman Literary, Larry
Weissman (larryweissman@earthlink.net)
OTHER PRESS • 8

JOHN MILLIKEN THOMPSON
LOVE AND LAMENT
Set in rural North Carolina between the Civil War and World
War I, Love and Lament chronicles the Hartsoe family’s ex-
traordinary hardships and misfortunes.
Mary Bet, the protagonist and youngest daughter of
eight, was born the same year the first railroad arrived in their
county. As she comes of age during the South’s reconstruction
and industrialization, she must learn to overcome her family’s
curse: the death of her mother and multiple siblings, a deaf
older brother, and her father’s growing insanity and rejection
of God.
In the rich tradition of Southern literature—including
William Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy and Pat Conroy’s The
Prince of Tides—John Milliken Thompson transports the
reader back in time through brilliant characterization and
meticulous detailing.
JOHN MILLIKEN THOMPSON is the author of The Reservoir
(Other Press, 2011). His articles have appeared in Smithson-
ian, the Washington Post, Islands, and other publications, and
his short stories have been published in Louisiana Literature,
South Dakota Review, and many other literary journals. He
holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and
has lived in the South all his life.
PRAISE FOR THE RESERVOIR
“Thompson masterfully illustrates how
a seemingly clear-cut case can be filled
with ambiguities.”
—Library Journal
“An engaging mystery novel rendered
as Southern literature.”
—Kirkus
“Pitch-perfect to the post–Civil War
era.…This is an impressive first
novel…hurtling toward greatness as
an artful vehicle for grappling with
temptations and the ambiguities of
guilt….The Reservoir gets stronger
and richer as it rolls toward its
startling climax.”
—Jim Lynch, Washington Post
FALL 2013
Pages: 420 approx.
Rights: World
FICTION
Agent: Trident Media Group, Ellen Levine
(ellen.assistant@tridentmediagroup.com)
OTHER PRESS • 9

STEVEN WATTS
SELF-HELP MESSIAH: DALE CARNEGIE AND
SUCCESS IN MODERN AMERICA
Before there was Tony Robbins, Marianne Williamson, Deepak
Chopra, or Steven Covey, there was Dale Carnegie. Since the
publication of his best-selling How to Win Friends and Influence
People in 1937, Carnegie has been hailed as the father of the
self-help movement and promoter of personal reinvention to
improve business success. Life magazine named him one of
“the most important Americans of the twentieth century.”
Despite his success and celebrity, little has been written
about the life and career of this influential figure in modern
American life.
Born in rural Missouri on a struggling farm, Carnegie yearned
to make a name for himself. He worked a number of odd jobs
until discovering his zeal for public speaking while at the YMCA.
It was a deep passion that would lead him to write the book that
would later define America’s modern approach to the workplace
and personal success. His impact stemmed from a simple but
profoundly transformative message: the ability to handle people
was the key to achievement, status, and prosperity in the world.
Such advice, with its reliance on human relations rather than
hardy individualism and unflinching morality, found a receptive
popular audience. Self-Help Messiah will reveal Carnegie’s
personal journey to the top, and how it gave rise to a greater
movement of self-help and personal reinvention.
STEVEN WATTS has published a number
of biographies on popular figures: The Magic
Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way
of Life, Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the
American Dream, and The People’s Tycoon:
Henry Ford and the American Century, which
was one of five finalists for the 2005 Los
Angeles Times Book Award in biography. He
teaches history at the University of Missouri.
TOP 10 BEST-SELLING BOOKS OF 2011
ON ABEBOOKS.COM
1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
by Stephen R. Covey
2. How to Win Friends and Influence
People by Dale Carnegie
3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
6. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer
Johnson
7. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
by Stieg Larsson
8. The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
9. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
10. Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals by Jamie Oliver
FALL 2013
Pages: 320
NONFICTION
Agent: Ron Goldfarb of Goldfarb & Associates
(rlglawlit@gmail.com)
OTHER PRESS • 10

WORLD ENGLISH
OTHER PRESS

GABI GLEICHMANN
THE ELIXIR OF IMMORTALITY
Translated from the Norwegian by Michael Meigs
Beginning in the eleventh century, the Spinoza family has
passed down, from father to son, a secret manuscript con-
taining the recipe for immortality. After thirty-six genera-
tions, the last descendent of this long and illustrious chain,
Ari Spinoza, doesn’t have a son to entrust the manuscript to.
From his deathbed, he begins to narrate his family’s history,
explaining its wavering and clandestine fate.
Ari’s two main sources of his family’s history are a trunk
of yellowing documents that he inherited from his grandfa-
ther, and his great uncle Fernando’s tales that captivated
him when he was a child. Fernando—a circus performer,
spiritualist, and survivor of both world wars—acquired most
of his stories from the deceased family members them-
selves, through a psychic medium in Budapest.
Mysterious and captivating, The Elixir of Immortality is
a vast multigenerational saga and an alternate retelling of
European history centered around the family’s triumphs in
medicine, philosophy, and science, and their persecution as
Sephardic Jews. The tales wander through ages of tyran-
ny, creativity, and social upheaval—into medieval Portugal,
Grand Inquisitor Torquemada’s Spain, Rembrandt’s Amster-
dam, the French Revolution, Freud’s Vienna, and the horrors
of both world wars. If Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Soli-
tude took place in cosmopolitan Europe, or if the cast of the
Arabian Nights rubbed shoulders with the greatest minds of
Western civilization, then those works might resemble this
magical and tragic novel.
GABI GLEICHMANN was born in Budapest in 1954 and
raised in Sweden. After studies in literature and philosophy,
he worked as a journalist and served as president of the
Swedish PEN organization. Gleichmann now lives in Oslo
and works as a writer, publisher, and literary critic. His first
novel, The Elixir of Immortality, was sold to eleven countries
prior to its publication in Norway.
PRAISE FOR
THE ELIXIR OF IMMORTALITY
“A fantastic yarn not only about the
Jewish Spinoza family but also about
the history of ideas in Europe during
the past thousand years.”
—Aftenposten
“Gabi Gleichmann’s debut is virtually
unparalleled in Norway…The great
strength of the book lies in the universal
stories that tell a great deal about Europe,
but even more about human nature.”
—Dagbladet
RIGHTS SOLD
DENMARK: Lindhardt & Ringhof
FRANCE: Grasset
GERMANY: Carl Hanser Verlag
HUNGARY: Athenaeum Kiado
ISRAEL: Keter
ITALY: Bompiani
LITHUANIA: Gimtasis Zodis
NETHERLANDS: De Geus
SERBIA: Sezam Books
SPAIN: Anagrama
FALL 2013
Pages: 650 approx.
Rights: World English
FICTION
Agent: Aschehoug Agency, Even Råkil
(even.rakil@aschehoug.no)
OTHER PRESS • 12

YANNICK GRANNEC
THE GODDESS OF SMALL VICTORIES
Translated from the French by Willard Wood
This debut novel begins at Princeton University in 1980,
when a young librarian named Anna Roth tries to obtain
the private papers of recently deceased Kurt Gödel—one
of the most important mathematicians and logicians of the
twentieth century, a close friend of Albert Einstein, author
of the famous “incompleteness theorems,” and the subject
of Douglas Hofstadter’s magisterial Gödel, Escher, Bach. To
gain access to his papers, Anna must somehow convince
or coax the great man’s eighty-year-old dying widow Adèle,
who’s embittered by the loss of her husband and is taking
revenge on an unsympathetic scientific community by
withholding these invaluable documents.
The two women meet, at first with mistrust, but after
several visits Adèle begins to treat Anna as her confidant
and tentatively agrees to surrender the documents.
Gradually unfolding through their conversations, Adèle’s
heartbreaking narrative is about a loving wife who spent
her entire adult life trying to keep her brilliant but mentally
unstable husband from succumbing to insanity. Moving
from Vienna in the 1930s to postwar Princeton, from the
Anschluss to McCarthyism, The Goddess of Small Victories
is a vivid fictionalized narrative of the most important
scientific and political upheavals of the twentieth century.
It is also, like Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, a moving
portrait of a great genius’s destructive force, and a deeply
touching ode to self-sacrifice.
YANNICK GRANNEC lives in Saint-Paul-de-Vence,
France. She is trained as an industrial designer and now
works in graphic design. The Goddess of Small Victories
is her first novel.
PRAISE FOR
THE GODDESS OF SMALL VICTORIES
“This portrait of a woman at once free and
trapped, destroyed and invincible, is not the
only strength of Yannick Grannec’s book. She
had the intelligence to construct a narrative
that approaches scientific genius peripherally,
while still finding a way of making it deeply
profound….A beautiful novel about love and
mourning that movingly follows the trajectory
of an exceptional man who sacrificed himself
to his quest for a truth higher than life.”
—Le Monde des livres
“Yannick Grannec plays with time and place
with the dexterity that reveals gigantic
research and an unusual narrative talent….A
loving wife + a gifted mathematician = an
infernal couple and a brilliant subject.”
—Elle
“An astonishing first novel….Yannick Grannec
manages to make the arid area of formal logic
exciting and epic.”
—Le Point
RIGHTS SOLD:
AUSTRIA/GERMANY: Ecowin Verlag
SPRING 2014
Pages: 468 approx.
Rights: World English
FICTION
Anne Carriere, Yasmina Urien
(yasmina.urien@anne-carriere.fr)
OTHER PRESS • 13

OLGA GRJASNOWA
ALL RUSSIANS LOVE BIRCH TREES
Translated from the German by Eva Bacon
Mascha is a cosmopolitan polyglot—fluent in five languages
and able to get by in several others—living in Frankfurt with
her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling
for residence permits, and her unemployed parents rarely
leave the house except to compare petrol prices. Mascha
has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter,
when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious injury. In
fright and despair, she flees to Israel, and before long, her
past catches up with her in the most brutal way.
Olga Grjasnowa has a unique gift of seeing the funny
side of even the most tragic situations. With cool irony and
great conciseness, her debut novel, which was shortlisted
for the prestigious Aspekte-Literaturpreis in 2012, tells the
story of a headstrong young woman who knows neither
borders nor limits. She inhabits a world where all cultures
and traditions merge. For Mascha and her friends, the is-
sue of origin and nationality is immaterial—they can survive
anywhere. But there is nowhere they can really call home.
OLGA GRJASNOWA was born in 1984 in Baku, Azerbai-
jan, grew up in the Caucasus, and has spent extended peri-
ods in Poland, Russia, and Israel. She moved to Germany at
the age of twelve and is a graduate of the German Institute
for Literature/Creative Writing in Leipzig. In 2010 she was
awarded the Dramatist Prize of the Wiener Wortstätten for
her debut play, “Mitfühlende Deutsche” (Compassionate
Germans). She is currently studying dance science at the
Berlin Free University.
PRAISE FOR
ALL RUSSIANS LOVE BIRCH TREES
“Here the world comes to you, as it never
has appeared to you in a novel. With
power, with wit, with wisdom and clarity,
with subtlety and grief.”
—Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
“Olga Grjasnowa writes from the nerve
center of her generation.”
—Ursula März, Die Zeit
RIGHTS SOLD
CROATIA: Edicije Bozicevic
DENMARK: C&K Forlag
FRANCE: Les Escales
SPAIN: Ediciones Còmplices
SWEDEN: Weyler Bokförlag
FALL 2013
Pages: 250
Rights: World English
FICTION
Agent: Regal Literary, Inc., Markus Hoffman
(markus@regal-literary.com)
OTHER PRESS • 14

OTHER PRESS
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