Gorky Park’s great book giveaway

Moscow’s Gorky Park will publish a collection of five books each month from now until September, available for free in its bookshops. The first five are: Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener; Bruce Chatwin’s short story Volga; Gennady Shpalikov’s Walking the Streets of Moscow; Mikhail Kuzmin’s The Trout Breaks the Ice; and Boris Zhitkov’s Vasili Mutny.

Each collection will feature a variety of literary forms from poetry to essays to short stories. The length of each, between 40 and 60 pages, means visitors should be able to finish reading a book during a single trip to the park. Olga Zakharova, director of Gorky Park, said: “People come to the park to get new impressions, to be surprised, to do what there’s often no time to do in the busy capital.”

The books were designed by ABC Design and published by Ad Marginem. Dmitry Mordvintsev, director of ABC design, told The Calvert Journal that the covers were designed “with minimal intrusion of topography on the one hand to attract attention, on the other to to refer the reader to the nostalgic image of Soviet book covers.”