In the surreal and darkly humorous stories of Alta Ifland’s Elegy for a Fabulous World, the narrator recalls an eccentric family and their polyglot friends and neighbors–Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Gypsies, Jews, Russians–surviving together in a space where fable, reality, and State-issued lies are impossible to untangle. In the book s second section the narratives immigrate to the United States, where the skepticism learned in fabulous youth infects and frustrates American attitudes and institutions. Real fictions of strange lands, Ifland’s stories demonstrate a deep sympathy with the visionary outsider and a vital and provocative international point of view.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
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!