“Beautiful language. The piercing clarity of being. Continuity of family and memory - everything that a real Reader yearns for now,” Dina Rubina said about Elena Katishonok’s first book, “Once upon a time there were an old man and an old woman.” Since then, the author has published three more novels, she has become a popular writer, a laureate of the Yasnaya Polyana Prize, which, as it were, noted the “Tolstyan reflection” on her prose. And now, in full accordance with the Yasnaya Polyana tradition, Elena Katishonok presents the reader with a book of short prose - stories, novels and “summary of a novel,” as she herself designated the genre of “Happy Felix,” which literally takes your breath away. And other stories, probably, the author could expand from “sketches” into more spacious canvases. I could have - but I didn't. Because he knows the value of precise detail, a laconic phrase, a masterfully constructed plot. The whole book has a single plot. The author sees it this way: “from the shining endless day of a child to the inexorable adult autumn, when the sun moves towards sunset, but the more frantic the desire to live becomes.”