books about books?`

[Ellen Rutten]

how about turgenev's good old faust - if you're looking for books on
consumers of books?

yours,
ellen



Ellen Rutten
University of Cambridge
Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages
Slavonic Department
Sidgwick Avenue
UK-Cambridge CB3 9DA
www.ellenrutten.nl



On 1/11/09, Anne Fisher <anne.o.fisher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks to all for their suggestions of "books about books," especially from
> contemporary popular fiction.
> Tatyana, the Links and Gursky novels are great leads. Do you know if there
> is a whole contemporary sub-genre of "bibliomystery" in Russian as there is
> in English (for examples see http://www.librarything.com/tag/bibliomystery)?
> I wasn't thinking of Master and Margarita simply because for me that story
> is more about the act of writing a book, i.e. about authorship and
> creativity, than about a book per se (but I know that this is a very
> debatable point).
>
> Right now I'm thinking about stories dealing with the consumers of books -
> would there a Russian version of A. S. Byatt's "Possession" out there (hmm,
> which poets' illicit love affair is left to discover, even fictionally)?
>
> Or, if we want to talk about the production side of things, there is
> Michelle Lovric's "The Floating Book," a titillating story of love and lust
> and printing, set in immediately-post-Gutenberg Venice (although it's often
> more romance novel than it is historical fiction). Any racy historical
> fiction about Ivan Fyodorov out there? I don't see him attracting quite the
> female attention that Lovric's printer does, but he did have a lot of
> adventure in his life.
>
> Or even something like Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief" (young adult
> historical fiction in which German girl helps Jew hide from SS, she steals
> books for him to read, he teaches her to read and makes her a handmade book,
> etc. One of the only books I've read narrated by Death.)
>
> Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" is also a
> great story of an entire publishing industry, but I'm not sure what the
> closest Soviet or Russian pop culture industry equivalent could even be...
>
> At any rate, these are some of the books about books that are out there in
> English. Thanks for your suggestions of Russian books on books.
>
> Annie
>
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