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Writers: Paavo Matsin (Tartu) and Baret Magarian (Florence)
Moderator: Rosie Goldsmith (London)
Moderator of live stream comments: Veronika Trubel (Vienna)
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Paavo Matsin’s novel Gogol’s Disco is set some time into the future – the newly formed Tsarist Empire of Russia violently annexes the entire Baltic region, thereby erasing every trace of Estonian culture. Then Nikolai Gogol emerges, risen from the dead after 170 years, and an absurd round dance begins. With anarchic humour, Matsin manages to make fear and inner turmoil tangible and at the same time to lead them ad absurdum. A nightmarish,
odd dystopia, a bizarre glimpse of the present.

The Fabrications, by Baret Magarian, is a dark satire on fantasies of fantastical power and the absurdity of today’s media world. What the novel’s main character writes gradually turns into reality; he falls into the hands of a spin doctor and lands at the centre of a storm of media hype. The real and the invented are
mixed up in the maelstrom. Do we need drastic forms of comedy and hubris to still be able to design social panoramas of our globalized present reality? Can dreams and traumas of today be presented in comedy?

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