January 26, 2021

Buffalo is the New Bovine


Buffalo is the New Bovine
Buffaloes in Moscow?  Wolfgang Hasselmann, unsplash.com

Have you had a hankering for fresh buffalo milk lately? Do you happen to live in the Moscow region? Well, you’re in luck! Plans are being made for a large-scale buffalo milk production complex in the Moscow region municipality of Naro-Fominsk

The 23,278,960 square meter facility will hold 900 dairy buffalos, capable of producing 2,000 tons of “premium” buffalo milk, says the Moscow Region Minister of Agriculture and Food. The project itself will cost 3.1 billion rubles and will create 120 new jobs in the region. Could be a fun career change, no?

The animals themselves will be purchased from Bulgaria and Italy (but we really hope someone has thought of a way to help them adjust to the colder climate). The facility will also be housing some 2,400 dairy cows, presumably to satisfy the less lactose-adventurous consumer. 

All we want to know now is, can you still make kefir out of it? 

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Our edition of The Little Golden Calf, one of the greatest Russian satires ever, is the first new translation of this classic novel in nearly fifty years. It is also the first unabridged, uncensored English translation ever, and is 100% true to the original 1931 serial publication in the Russian journal 30 Dnei. Anne O. Fisher’s translation is copiously annotated, and includes an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, the daughter of one of the book’s two co-authors.

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Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

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In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.

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