Rosa Jamali is a Persian poet based in Tehran. She studied Drama & Literature at Art University of Tehran and holds a Master degree in English literature from Tehran University. She has published six collections of poetry . Her first book, This Dead Body is Not an Apple, It is Either a Cucumber or a Pear, was published in 1997 and opened new landscapes and possibilities for Persian contemporary poetry. Through broken syntax and word-play, she described a surreal world in which words have lost their meanings and have become jumbled objects within everyday life. In her other collections, she adapted a kind of music from classical Persian poetry and imbued it with natural cadences of speech, juxtaposing long and short sentences. In her recent poems she creates some layers of intertextuality with Persian mythology and mysticism. Rosa Jamali’s poetry also enjoys a free-flowing influence of English poets like T.S. Eliot. She is also an active translator; she compiled a recently published anthology of anglophone poets in her own translation into Persian. She was a lecturer on Persian poetry at the British Library and at the US Persian Study centres and has contributed to many poetry festivals worldwide. She has also written a number of scholarly articles on poetry, literary theory and creative writing.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!
“Cold War Casual” is a collection of transcribed oral testimony and interviews translated from Russian into English and from English into Russian that delve into the effect of the events and the government propaganda of the Cold War era on regular citizens of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Julia Wiener was born in the USSR a few years before the Second World War; her youth was spent during the “Thaw” period, and her maturity coincided with the years of “Soviet stagnation”, which, in her case, ended with her emigration to Israel in the early 1970s. Her wartime childhood, her Komsomol-student youth, her subsequent disillusionment, her meetings with well-known writers (Andrei Platonov, Victor Nekrasov, etc.) are described in a humorous style and colorful detail. Julia brings to life colorful characters – from her Moscow communal apartment neighbors to a hippie London lord, or an Arab family, headed by a devotee of classical Russian literature. No less diverse are the landscapes against which the events unfold: the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Garden of Gethsemane, New York, Amsterdam, London.
Julia Wiener’s novels focus on those moments when illusory human existence collapses in the face of true life, be it spiritual purity, love, old age, or death.