Vladimir Gandelsman is the 2011 recipient of the highest award for poetry, the Moscow Reckoning Prize. He was born in 1948 in Leningrad, and has been living in the United States since 1990. Gandelsman is the author of eighteen poetry collections and two volumes of collected works, as well as numerous translations of British and American poets into Russian.
When Clea returns to London with her new Russian husband, she is surprised to see him become even more eccentric.
A haunting dystopia some readers have called “the new 1984.” In a society where memory is rewritten and resistance is pre-approved, freedom isn’t restricted; it’s redefined. As systems evolve beyond human control and choice becomes a simulation, true defiance means refusing the script, even when the system already knows you will.
“13 short pieces…pungently convey the effects of growing up under a totalitarian regime.” .—Publishers Weekly
Original poetry by Nina Kossman, accompanied by a selection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian by Kossman. “The sea is a postcard,” writes Nina Kossman. There is both something elemental in this vision and—iron-tough.”
—Ilya Kaminsky