In 2002 Overlook acquired Ardis Publishers, a small company specializing in translations of Russian literature and founded in 1971 by Russian scholars Carl and Elenndea Proffer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their goal was to bring the West contemporary writers working in the Soviet Union and to offer American scholars critical editions of the great Russian Literature of the Early twentieth century. The Proffers and Ardis were instrumental in bringing Joseph Brodsky to the U.S. by assuring him a job at the University of Michigan. The Ardis list includes works by Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, Sologub, Pushkin, Tsvetaeva, and Mandelstam in acclaimed translations by Walter Arndt, Vladimir Nabokov, S.D. Cioran, and Diana Burgin and Katherine O’Connor, among others. Other recent additions to Overlook’s Russian

publishing program are 2017, by Olga Slavnikova, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz and winner of the Russian Booker Prize, Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmila Ulitskaya, and the international literary sensation Labyrinths of Echo, a ten-book fantasy series by Max Frei.

The name Ardis comes from the novel Ada by Vladimir Nabokov. In the novel, an estate named Ardis, located in a mythical place blending attributes of both Russia and America is a symbol of cultural exchange between two literary traditions. Today, more than ever, we believe that Ardis has a vital role to play, and join with the founders who believed that Alexander Pushkin was right when he described literary translators as the ‘post-horses on enlightenment.’