Deal Announcement: Deep Vellum to Publish Mikhail Shishkin's The Taking of Izmail in Summer 2028
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE —
Deep Vellum is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Mikhail Shishkin’s The Taking of Izmail, which will be translated into English for the first time by Max Lawton, for publication in summer 2028. Originally published in Russian in 1999, The Taking of Izmail was awarded the Russian Booker Prize in 2000. It is widely considered to be Shishkin’s first masterpiece and a major work of contemporary Russian literature.
The novel begins as the story of a lawyer who travels the Russian countryside defending young women accused of killing their children, and gradually transforms into a postmodern symphony of various registers and modes: letters, diaries, lectures, legal testimony, criminology textbooks, ancient fables, chronicles, and more. The title references a famous eighteenth-century battle fought between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in what is now southern Ukraine—a battle ironically reenacted here in the form of a circus routine featuring trained mice.
Max Lawton describes The Taking of Izmail and its pivotal place within the Russian tradition: “The Taking of Izmail represents a road not travelled by the Russian novel––what if they had actually *done modernism* and scholars didn’t merely apply Poundian notions and Joycean constructions to USSR-approved works of realism tugged in one direction or another, pretending like Gladkov’s Cement is in some way an adequate riposte to the elevated idiom of high-church texts from further west… No, no––Shishkin actually does it here. A collage-novel. A sinuous compilation of voices. A detonation of a history textbook. The end of the Russian tradition. The beginning of something else.“
Calligraphy Lesson, Shishkin’s first English-language collection of short stories, was published by Deep Vellum in 2015.
Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most celebrated Russian authors today. Born in 1961 in Moscow, he worked as a school teacher and journalist. In 1995 he moved to Switzerland, where he worked as a Russian and German translator within the Immigration Department and specifically with Asylum Seekers. His works – both fiction and non-fiction – have been translated into over 40 languages and have received many prestigious national and international awards, including Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award (2011), Premio Strega Europeo (2022), the Russian Booker Prize (2000), the National Bestseller Prize (2006), the Big Book Award (2006, 2011) and many others. Today Shishkin is a fearless critic of Putin’s regime and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. His translation of Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh was one of the most anticipated English-language titles of 2025. Max is also currently working on or has plans to translate works by Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Miquel de Palol. His first novel, Progress, is coming out with Verso in 2027. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.
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For rights inquiries, contact Sarah McEachern: sm@deepvellum.org