Boris Dralyuk

Irina Mashinski's poems in Giornata inhabit the landscape of elegy and exile, as well as the actual landscape of rural America. She forgets nothing, asking without self-pity, "Who's left?" These translations feel wholly original, rich in music, but mostly rich with the poet's sensibility, the tenderness with which she opens to her losses and offers them to us, like her grandmother's "Moscow teacups" an image so simple and so arresting.

A new collection of short fiction and nonfiction by a Russian master of bittersweet humor, dramatic irony, and poignant insights into contemporary life. The town of Tarusa lies 101 kilometers outside Moscow, far enough to have served, under Soviet rule, as a place where former political prisoners and other "undesirables" could legally settle. Lying between the center of power and the provinces, between the modern urban capital and the countryside, Tarusa is the perfect place from which to observe a Russia that, in Maxim Osipov's words, "changes a lot in the course of a decade], but in two centuries--not at all." The stories and essays in this volume--a follow-up to his debut in English, Rock, Paper, Scissors--tackle major questions of modern life in and beyond Russia with Osipov's trademark blend of daring and subtlety. Deceit, political pressure, ethnic discrimination, the urge to emigrate, and the fear of abandoning one's home, as well as myriad generational debts and conflicts, are as complexly woven through these pieces as they are through the lives of Osipov's fellow Russians and through our own. What binds the prose in this volume is not only a set of concerns, however, but also Osipov's penetrating insights and fearless realism. "Dreams fall away, one after another," he writes in the opening essay, "some because they come true, but most because they prove pointless." Yet, as he reminds us in the final essay, when viewed from ground level, "life tends not towards depletion, towards zero, but, on the contrary, towards repletion, fullness."

"The wit and daring of his rhymes and phrasing remind me of that old master, Donald Justice, who dazzled us with the elegance of his forms. Dralyuk carries this high style into the 21st century, and I, for one, am thrilled to be in the presence of his marvelous verbal art. Pay attention, readers: a new maestro is in our midst."--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa "These poems] are the souvenirs of an almost-vanished glamour, an ethnic, gritty, free-wheeling city, little fantasias encased in rhyme and meter."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney'sMy Hollywood and Other Poems is a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of migr s in Los Angeles. In forms ranging from ballades to villanelles to Onegin sonnets, the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. My Hollywood draws on the poet's own life as a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, honors the vanishing traces of the city's past, and, in crisp and poignant translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke."Dralyuk embraces rhyme with a rare and admirable enthusiasm for sound and syllable, for musical variety and plays on words . . . An] air of upbeat sorrow permeates My Hollywood. It's an migr mood, defined by the conviction that things could always be worse."--New York Review of Books"Sophisticated, musical, and often humorous."--Booklist"Byronic rhymes are poetry's answer to special effects, and Dralyuk's skill at slipping them in--so that the art seems artless--is worthy of Industrial Light & Magic . . . What's true of my favorite films is true of this book: the lines are first-rate, but it's the images that linger."-- Austin Allen, The Hopkins Review"My Hollywood is a first-rate collection of precise, delightfully graceful poems, the poet as Fred Astaire tap-dancing up and down the lines."--Russian Life

The first English-language collection of a contemporary Russian master of the short story. Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia's best-regarded writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to craft stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Rich in compassion but devoid of cheap sentiment, Osipov's fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of life in provincial Russia -- its tragedies, its infinite frustrations, and its moments of humble beauty and inspiration. The twelve stories in this volume depict doctors, actors and actresses, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses, and common criminals, whose paths intersect in unpredictable yet entirely natural ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices, on trains, and in the air. Their encounters lead to disasters, major and minor epiphanies, andrich -- on occasion -- the promise of redemption. "Life is scary, whether you're in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or the provinces," Osipov's narrator tells us in "The Cry of the Domestic Fowl," which opens the collection. And yet, he concludes, " t]he world doesn't break, no matter what you throw at it. That's just how it's built."

This book examines the staggering popularity of early-twentieth-century Russian detective serials. Traditionally maligned as “Pinkertonovshchina,” these appropriations of American and British detective stories featuring Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Ethel King, and scores of other sleuths swept the Russian reading market in successive waves between 1907 and 1917, and famously experienced a “red” resurgence in the 1920s under the aegis of Nikolai Bukharin. The book presents the first holistic view of “Pinkertonovshchina” as a phenomenon, and produces a working model of cross-cultural appropriation and reception. The “red Pinkerton” emerges as a vital “missing link” between pre- and post-Revolutionary popular literature, and marks the fitful start of a decades-long negotiation between the regime, the author, and the reading masses.