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Olivier Rolin

    May 17, 1947

    Drawing inspiration from the revolutionary spirit of May '68, the ideals of the proletarian Left, and romantic adventures in Arabia, Olivier Rolin crafts narratives that resonate with a sense of passionate exploration. Influenced by the literary legacies of Rimbaud and Conrad, as well as his own extensive travels, his writing is marked by a distinctive philosophical depth and a flair for evocative storytelling. Rolin masterfully blends intellectual inquiry with compelling prose, inviting readers into a world rich with thematic complexity and emotional nuance. His work offers a unique lens through which to examine the intricate tapestry of human connection and the enduring quest for meaning.

    Olivier Rolin
    Hotel Crystal
    Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man's Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death
    Stalin's Meteorologist
    • Winner of the 2014 Prix du Style "Masterful . . . An eloquent addition to a violent episode in the history of science in the twentieth century." —Nature In 1934, the highly respected head of the Soviet Union’s meteorology department, Alexei Feodosievich Wangenheim, was suddenly arrested without cause and sentenced to a gulag. Less than a year after being hailed by Stalin as a national hero, he ended up with thousands of other "political prisoners" in a camp on Solovetsky Island, under vast northern skies and surrounded by water that was, for more than six months of the year, a sheet of motionless ice. He was violently executed in 1937—a fact kept from his family for nearly twenty years. Olivier Rolin masterfully weaves together Alexei's story and his eventual fate, drawing on an archive of letters and delicate drawings of the natural world that Wangenheim sent to his family from prison. Tragically, Wangenheim never stopped believing in the Revolution, maintaining that he'd been incarcerated by accident, that any day Stalin would find out and free him. His stubbornness suffuses the narrative with tension, and offers insight as to how he survived an impossible situation for so long. Stalin’s Meteorologist is a fascinating work that casts light on the devastating consequences of politically inspired paranoia and the mindlessness and trauma of totalitarianism—relevant revelations for our time.

      Stalin's Meteorologist: One Man's Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death
    • At some Parisian lost-and-found, a mysterious manuscript scribbled onto stray bits of hotel stationary and postcards and stuffed into an abandoned briefcase comes into the hands of an “editor,” who claims to faithfully transcribe and assemble the random texts. On the face of it, these consist of fastidious descriptions of a series of hotel rooms in cities around the globe, but their world-weary writer, a certain “Olivier Rolin,” is also involved in a number of highly improbable international networks, populated by unsavory thugs and Mata Haris in distress. Author Olivier Rolin has dipped into his extensive travel notebooks to create this highly inventive novel that spoofs, among others, the decaying international espionage scene, the literary author publicity tour, and official French culture, all against a backdrop of the queasy alienation secreted by standard-issue hotel rooms across the globe.

      Hotel Crystal