My Life at First Try
My Life at First Try
My Life at First Try
by Mark Budman

Alex, an unsinkable optimist, engineer, writer and inventor, scion of a family persecuted by Stalin, is always fighting: from the brutal Chechens at home to the Christian fundamentalists in America. An escapee from the USSR, the most tyrannical regime on Earth, he comes to the US at the age of 30 in search of love, freedom and riches. Will his newly acquired ability to vote for an elephant or an ass bring him all three? If not, which requirement does he need to sacrifice? He has only one life to answer this question.

Also on our Bookshelf:

by Osip Mandelstam

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.

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

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.

 

by Mark Budman

Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)

by Victor Enyutin

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.

by Nina Kossman

A collection of poems in Russian. Published by Khudozhestvennaya literatura (Художественная литература). Moscow, 1990.

by Anna Krushelnitskaya

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!