We are delighted to announce that Gigory Knaovich’s novel ‘Devilspel’ will be published on the 12th March 2019.
Devilspel by Grigory Kanovich, the second of the leading Lithuanian author’s books to be published by independent press Noir and into English for the very first time, focuses in on the lives of the inhabitants of Mishkine from the point of view of multiple narrators. According to Mikhail Krutikov, Professor at the University of Michigan, Grigory Kanovich “is the only writer in the entire world capable of depicting the life of the pre-war Jewish shtetl [a small Jewish town or village] with the documentary precision of an immediate witness and the deep emotional passion of a lover mourning his loss. He survived the Holocaust almost by a miracle, and made it his mission to serve, against all odds, as a custodian of the collective memory of generations of Litvaks, Lithuanian Jews.”
The author, who turns 90 this year, is one of the most prominent living Jewish writers and winner of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts for 2014. Kanovich’s works, translated into 14 languages, with over 1.5 million copies sold, form an epic Litvak Saga – a memorial and a requiem to a community now vanished. Since 1993, the writer, who is a member of PEN Club, has lived in Israel. Shtetl Love Song was published by Noir Press in 2017 and the play Smile Upon Us, Lord based on two of Kanovich’s novels, and which has been adapted by Rimas Tuminas for the stage will be screened across the UK in cinemas this month. “A comic, epic ‘Waiting for Jehovah’” – Guardian