Manga, Moe, Isekai: The Big Guide to Anime

Why

Anime is huge in Russia, but there had never been a proper book about it in Russian — one you could hand to a friend who’s curious, and also keep on your own shelf. Kinopoisk, the country’s biggest film platform, had already tested the idea with an online special project about anime; readers loved it. They came to me to turn that into a book.

What I did

I compiled the book — which in practice meant three jobs.

First, the concept and the plan: what a guide to anime has to cover, what it can skip, and how to order it so that a newcomer isn’t lost and a fan isn’t bored. That was the painful part. Everything felt important; the plan is where we decided what to leave out.

Second, the authors. I put together a team of 27 writers — critics, researchers, people who run the best anime channels in Russian — and matched each one to the chapter they could write better than anyone else. Then I edited the whole thing into one book with one voice.

Third, two chapters of my own: on isekai, the wildly popular “another world” genre, and on iyashikei — “healing” anime, stories with almost no conflict where the point is calm itself. Almost nothing had been written about it in Russian, and I think calm is exactly what the world is short of.

The work took about a year and a half.

What came out

The book came out on 28 July 2026 — paper edition through Alpina Non-Fiction, audio and e-book exclusive to Yandex Books. It was priced for a mass audience, under 1,000 rubles. Half the first print run sold in under a week; two extra print runs followed and sold out too. In its first week it reached #3 on Yandex Books’ weekly chart with close to 15,000 readers.