Лучшие книги Рассела Хобана

"Амариллис день и ночь" увлекает читателя на поиски сокровенных истоков любви, в волшебное странствие по дорогам грез и воспоминаний. Преуспевающий лондонский художник Питер Диггс погружается в сновидения и тайную жизнь Амариллис - загадочной и прекрасной женщины, которая неким необъяснимым образом связана с трагедией, выпавшей на его долю в далеком прошлом. Пытаясь разобраться в складывающихся между ними странных отношениях, Питер все больше запутывается в хитросплетениях снов и яви, пока, наконец, любовь не придает ему силы "пройти сквозь себя самого" и обрести себя в душе возлюбленной. Автор словно побуждает эту непростую историю…

Британский романист американо-еврейского происхождения Расселл Хобан — это отдельное явление в англоязычной литературе, магический сюрреалист, настоящий лондонец, родившийся в Пенсильвании, сын украинских евреев, участник Второй мировой. Сперва Хобан писал только для детей, но с 1973 года — как раз с романов «Лев Боаз-Яхинов и Яхин-Боазов» и «Кляйнцайт» — он начинает сочинять для взрослых, и это наше с вами громадное везение. По-русски у Расселла Хобана выходило две книги — «Мышонок и его отец» (1968), условно детская книга, и «Амариллис день и ночь» (2001), роман для взрослых, и нам в «Додо Пресс» давно хотелось опубликовать два гораздо…

Роман Рассела Хобана "Мышонок и его отец" - классика жанра детской литературы и в то же время философская притча, которая непременно отыщет путь к сердцу взрослого читателя. В этом символическом повествовании о странствиях двух заводных мышей тонкий лиризм сочетается с динамичностью сюжета и яркими, незабываемыми образами персонажей. Надежда и стойкость на пути к преображению и обретению смысла бытия - вот лишь одна из множества сквозных тем этой книги, которая не оставит равнодушным ни одного читателя, задающегося вопросами жизни и смерти.

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later, he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here, he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery Kleinzeit. In German that means 'hero', or 'smalltime'. It depends on whom you ask. 'Russell Hoban is our Ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other'

В англоязычной литературе мало примеров такого удачного переноса мифа на чужую почву, вживления его, яркого, в серые лондонские буднишки. Скитания блудного сына, львиный ров, столпы пред храмом Соломоновым, имена которым Иахин и Воаз, «мне ли не пожалеть Ниневии, города великого…», — сколько смыслов, сколько вечных сюжетов сочетал в своем романе реб Рассел Хобан из Лансдейла, чтобы умилостивить сына своего Аброма от первой жены своей, Лилиан? Вернуть себе сыновнюю любовь с помощью художественного произведения – замысел, конечно, утилитарный. Но не только счастливый Абром — мы все получили возможность насладиться этим великолепным утилитарным замыслом. Теперь он пришел и к русскому читателю — спустя тридцать лет. Что, по сути дела, пустяк по сравнению с вечностью.

Pilgermann is a Jewish man in medieval Germany who has been castrated for an affair with the tax collector's wife. Throughout the ordeal of his punishment, he hears a voice telling him to travel to Jerusalem. As he makes his way there, he is taken hostage by pirates, bought by a Turkish merchant, and caught in the Crusades. Hoban tells a complex story through the meditative mind of a man caught in extreme circumstances.

On 4 November 2052 Fremder Gorm is found drifting in space a few megaklicks off Badu, a planet in the Fourth Galaxy. He is the only survivor from "Clever Daughter", a battered old tanker. Why did Fremder survive?

A brilliant, unique, and completely realized work of fiction, "Riddley Walker" - first published in 1980 - is set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), where humanity has regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state, represented by a language created especially by Hoban for the book.

On 4 November 2052, Fremder Gorn is discovered drifting in deep space. He has no spacesuit, no helmet, no oxygen, but he is still alive: the sole survivor from the mysteriously vanished ship Clever Daughter. How did he get here? To find out, Fremder must search through memory, dream and the unknowable fragments of his own mind.

It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation.

On an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward A4, he falls in love with the divine, rosy-cheeked Sister and is sent spinning into a quest involving, among other things, a glockenspiel, sheets of yellow paper, Orpheus, the Underground and that dirty chimpanzee, Death.

'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.

Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. Two lonely people, a bookseller and a children's illustrator, have begun thinking turtle thoughts. As they come together to hatch a plan to release the turtles into the sea, their diaries reveal how they find their own lives changing in imperceptible and quite unintended ways.

From the inimitable duo of Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake, the pair behind the hilarious tales of Captain Najork, comes a story about a little boy, a fire-breathing dragon, and their sky-high adventure! “I can make fire come out of my nose and mouth,” the dragon under the pavement tells John. “I can fly. I can spin gold into straw if you have any gold.” John doesn’t have any gold – and he doesn’t need any straw. (Not yet, anyway.) The dragon tells John that if he fights the dragon and wins, the dragon will take him flying.” What a challenge! Where will it lead? John soon finds out – and he also finds out that you just never know when a bundle of straw might come in handy… With sword-flashing excitement, a moon landing and plenty of magic, this irresistible page-turner is brought back into print in a bigger format – and a beautiful, more colourful, new edition.

A Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake classic, and a brilliant companion volume to How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, this is the story of Tom who invents a jam-powered frog. Fooling around as he loves to do, Tom takes his Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet out on the frog out for a spin. When Captain Najork sees them hopping past his window, he and his hired sportsmen jump into their pedal-powered snake and set off in hot pursuit. Events, adventure and sheer craziness conspire to bring Tom and the Captain together at the local girls’ boarding school, where Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong Najork is in the middle of a best-of-three arm-wrestling contest against the Headmistress… A rip-roaring adventure guaranteed to keep the pages turning and the laughs bouncing off the ceiling!

Tom loves to fool around. He fools around with dropping things from bridges into rivers and he fools around with barrels in alleys. He fools around so much that his maiden aunt, Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong (who wears an iron hat and takes no nonsense from anyone), sends for Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach Tom a lesson. "Captain Najork," says Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, "is seven feet tall, with eyes like fire and a voice like thunder. He teaches fooling-around boys the lesson they so badly need, and it is not one that they soon forget." Captain Najork lays down a challenge: they will play womble, muck and speedball – in that order. And it turns out not to be Tom who gets taught a lesson after all!

Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban’s surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary. William, a clerk at a used-book store, lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has left him without home or family. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation, “looks like the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks…like a man’s woman who hasn’t got a man.” Entirely unknown to each other, they are both drawn to the turtle tank at the London zoo with “minds full of turtle thoughts,” wondering how the turtles might be freed. And then comes the day when Neaera walks into William’s bookstore, and together they form an unlikely partnership to make what seemed a crazy dream become a reality.

Washed up on the beach during a storm, the sea-thing child clings fearfully to the shore until he discovers his true destiny. Colorful illustrations by award-winning artist Patrick Benson bring this heartwarming story to life.

Frances does not want to go to bed. She spins out her time downstairs by having a glass of milk, a piggyback and a kiss. In bed she can't sleep so she sings an alphabet song, a friendly tiger appears, and a giant, and a troublesome crack in the ceiling. Soon she finds she is tired.