Goran Simić was born in 1952 in Yugoslavia. Author of short stories, plays, opera librettos, he worked as an editor and columnist for magazines and radio. He emigrated from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Canada in 1996 under the auspices of the Canadian PEN. Now he lives in Sarajevo. Goran Simic’s works have been translated from Serbian into 15 languages and are included in the anthologies Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2000) and Banned Poetry (Index of Censorship, 1997). Winner of the US Hellman-Hammett PEN Award for Writer’s Freedom (1994) and the People’s Award of Canada (2006). Goran Simich’s collection of Sunrise in the Eyes of a Snowman was named the best collection of poetry in Canada 2012 by the Canadian Authors Association. He has authored the following books: Escape from the Cemetery (Oxford University Press, 1997), Immigrant Blues (Brick Books, 2003), From Sarajevo With Sadness (Biblioasis, 2005). Selected poems have been published in Great Britain, Romania, Russia, and Bulgaria.
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.