The two novels included in this book are works of Russian magic realism. In the first novel, Shadowplay on a Sunless Day, Anatoly Kudryavitsky writes about life in modern-day Moscow and about an emigrant's life in Germany. The chapters of this multi-layered novel form a narrative mosaic of episodes set in both real and surreal worlds. The novel deals with problems of self-identification, national identity and the crises of the generation of "new Europeans." In the second novel, A Parade of Mirrors and Reflection, the writer turns his attention to human cloning, an issue very much at the...

Coloured Handprints introduces 20 contemporary German-speaking poets, from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, to an English-language readership. Edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky, and translated from the German by Kudryavitsky and Yulia Kudryavitskaya the volume explores the reunified Germany, sometimes from the vantage point of "the train halted in the middle of the track" ('hamburg - berlin', by Jan Wagner), as it also reveals a modern Europe of "administrative chaos draped in / Brussels lace" ('Ach, Europa', by Nora Bossong). More than anything, however, it asserts the power of poetry to...