Nina Gabrielyan's happy amazement at the unceasing wonders of the ordinary world around her is irresistible. Moving from the real to the surreal, she invites the reader to come with her into these two realities, which eventually turn out to be one and the same, a place where the magic and the mundane merge, a reality that may at times be tragic or ridiculous, but is always exciting.

The novel Master of the Grass is the life story of a man passionately in love with himself and at odds with the world. As a young boy he is fascinated by his own reflection. He repeatedly attempts, as it were, to enter the land beyond the looking glass, trying to reach the other self in the mirror. What begins as a childish game turns into genuine Narcissism, damaging his own life and that of his young wife.

In "The Lilac Dressing Gown" an intense young girl takes refuge in her imagination especially every time she sneaks into her mother's wardrobe to try on her elegant dressing gown. In "The Studio Apartment" a lonely woman communicates with her apartment as though it were a living being. The apartment is her own micro-cosmos that comes alive with each new visitor. In her imagination the apartment resists any improvements, as if it possessed its own inherent essence, and reacts in very different ways to each new pretender to her heart.

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New fiction from a Russian artist and writer whose work explores the space between dream and reality.