Category: Russian Literature

June 16, 2020

New Book Tuesday! Ascent to Glory and The Nose and Other Stories

Our weekly list of new books is now available! Ascent to Glory How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic Álvaro Santana-Acuña Ascent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of One Hundred Years of Solitude, from the...

January 3, 2020

Announcing Our 2020 Literary Studies Catalog

Letter from the Editors: Four English professors, some friends, some strangers, decide to read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet together. Their subsequent exchange of letters and essays about the experience of reading the novels resulted in The Ferrante Letters. This book...

December 27, 2019

Take a Literary Vacation

It’s the middle of winter break, and as the temperature drops, snuggling up next to a cozy fire with a good book is the perfect way to relax. So today, we invite you to take a vacation through place and...

September 26, 2019

Sarah Vitali on Necropolis

“Khodasevich’s crystalline, mordant prose is skilfully handled by Sarah Vitali, who has done justice to the text and supplemented it with a wealth of endnotes that illuminate its more allusive and evasive moments. The edition also benefits from a stylish...

September 21, 2019

Susanne Fusso on Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage and Yuz Aleshkovsky’s Contribution to Russian Literature

“Joseph Brodsky once noted that Aleshkovsky had a Mozartian ear for the Russian language, and Nikolai Nikolaevich (1970), his first novel, as well as Camouflage (1978), his fourth – written the year before the author emigrated permanently to the US – are indeed virtuoso...

September 20, 2019

José Vergara on Teaching One of the World’s Worst Detective Stories

“Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf, delivered in Alexander Boguslawski’s masterful translation, comprises a daring act of immersion into the depths of language that results in semantic spasms of the great Russian literary body. The highly experimental novel, which unquestionably...

September 20, 2019

Emil Draitser on Redemption and How the Soviet Union Attempted to Cover-Up the Holocaust

“Redemption is awash with brutal truths, rude awakenings and painful self-discoveries. Gorenstein doesn’t make it easy for his reader: His forbidding theme is the aftermath of the Holocaust — the aftershock of ‘ineluctable, planned murder’ — and his protagonist is...

August 30, 2019

Weekend Reading List: Russian Literature in Translation

Women In Translation Month is winding down to a close, but you can still expand your literary horizons to include more works of Russian Literature authored by women. Our list below is split into two parts, first up is contemporary works of...

August 29, 2019

Book Excerpts! KLOTSVOG and THE MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE

 “Since its launch, the series has already enhanced the scope of Russian literary texts available in English, and it promises significantly more to come, with planned titles ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, by both new and established translators.” ~Katherine Bowers, Translation and...

August 28, 2019

Q&A: Marian Schwartz on The Man Who Couldn’t Die

“Darkly sardonic . . . . oddly timely, for there are all sorts of understated hints about voter fraud, graft, payoffs, and the endless promises of politicians who have no intention of keeping them. It is also deftly constructed, portraying...

August 27, 2019

Why A Novel About Post-War Trauma—Filled With Difficult Personalities—Makes a Great Beach Read

“Klotsvog is a story of everyday darkness told by the ultimate unreliable narrator… As Maya vibrates on a frequency between ruthless self-determination and charming narcissism, Klotsvog infects its audience with a compulsion to determine which dominates.” ~Foreword Reviews August is...

August 9, 2019

Book Excerpt! A Double Life

“Published in the revolutionary year of 1848, A Double Life traces the awakening of a young noblewoman who by day submits to the prose of high society matchmaking, while at night she is a poet in her dreams of true...