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Mavei Yankelevich, editor and translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, will participate in a reading and reception tomorrow night in Brooklyn. The event is sponsored by A Public Space magazine, Russian American Cultural Center, and Overlook. Matvei will be joined by Eugene Ostashevsky for this night devoted to Russian Absurdism. Wednesday, January 16, 7pm at A Public Space, 323 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY. For more information: 212-673-2524.

Matvei Yankelevich, editor/translator of Overlook's Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, talks to Michael Helke of the Stop Smiling website about the iconoclastic writer. Yankelevich's collection of prose and poetry by Kharms includes many works that have never been published before in the English language, and has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Book Review.

The Daniil Kharms revival continues with a feature story by Daniel Kalder on the Guardian Unlimited website. Today I Wrote Nothing, edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich, was also included in Billy Heller's "Required Reading" column in The New York Post. And the excellent blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Arts & Letters Daily, is featuring the George Saunders essay in The New York Times Book Review.

George Saunders considers Daniil Kharms in a long endpage essay in this week's The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Recently published to rave reviews, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, was edited and translated by Matvei Yankelevich. For the first time, English-language readers now have a comprehensive collection of the prose and poetry that secured Kharms’s literary reputation as one of the most brilliant and iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era.

Marjorie Perloff points out Today I Wrote Nothing as one of the "Books of the Year" in this week's issue of The Times Literary Supplement (TLS): "A dazzling book that gives me new hope for an avant garde writing that speaks to a larger audience. The Russian OBERIU poet Daniil Kharms, whose writings went unpublished in his lifetime (1905-42), was, as Matvei Yankelevich, the excellent editor and translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, remarks, much more than a 'Stalinist victim' or Soviet absurdist."

The latest issue of The New Yorker features excerpts from Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms.

Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published. In 1931, Kharms was charged with anti-Soviet activities and briefly exiled from Leningrad. In 1941, he was arrested by the N.K.V.D. for making “defeatist statements”; sentenced to incarceration in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital, he died of starvation the following year, during the siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t until the late nineteen-seventies that Kharms’s playful and poetic work began to appear in mainstream publications in Russia. Several books followed, as did festivals in Kharms’s honor and critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco.

The gentleman translator of The Overlook Press' forthcoming Fall 2007 title TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITING OF DANIIL KHARMS visited our offices and graced our conference room today. Check out the video, featuring a reading of "Blue Notebook #10" from the piping-hot galleys that have just arrived.