A collection of essays by prose writer, translator, and critic Alexey Polyarинов is like a heartfelt conversation with a good friend about cinema and literature. The author shares his deepest thoughts—ideas for books that were never written: he tells about a novel of adventures of Cervantes’s mother, about a fanfiction based on “The Wizard of Oz,” and even gives an imagined tour of a morgue near Moscow, while also delivering a lecture on the dead in Russian literature. In the second part, you’ll find the story of “cursed friendship” between Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, essays about one of the most terrifying American historical novels—Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” reflections on the emergence of the global novel, and other texts about cinema and literature written with unbelievable love for the subject and a great sense of humor.