Upcoming Book: Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

I came across Maria Reva’s short story “Unsound” in a copy of McSweeney’s, catching up on my reading over the holidays. It’s a striking piece of fiction that’s set in a fictional orphanage in the Soviet Union, where infants are rated according to a disability scale and judged accordingly. Notwithstanding, the orphan who emerges as a protagonist of the story, Zaya, has a lot going for her–a certain resilience of the spirit that makes her narrative particularly endearing.

Judging by quality of Reva’s previous publications and the reception this particular story has received–it was listed in a major magazine award that McSweetney recently won–this book has a very big future ahead of it. The pub date is March 10, 2020, and it’s already available on pre-order.

A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva’s ingeniously intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609447/good-citizens-need-not-fear-by-maria-reva/

A bonus: Reva’s story “Novostroika” was published in the Atlantic. This looks to be a section from the upcoming novel.

Publisher: Doubleday

Pub date: March 10, 2020

A Reading Recommendation: Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life

This reading recommendation comes to us via Jennifer Eremeeva’s Twitter feed. (Thank you the amazing Russian literary twitter!) Nino Haratischvili was born in Georgia in 1983 (according to Wikipedia), and lives and writes in German. She has been publishing fiction and drama since approx. 2001, and her novel The Eighth Life (for Brilka) was recently translated to English by Charlotte Collins and published by Scribe–Australia and UK based publisher.

Brief description from the publisher: “At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste …”

Note: In German, Nino’s last name is spelled “Haratischwili,” but in the English publication, it’s “v” instead of “w”: Haratischvili.

Publisher: Scribe

Pub date: October 1, 2019

Recently Published: Paper-Thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi, translated by J. Kates

In May, Zephyr Press and publisher and translator J. Kates brought to us a collection of poetry by Aigerim Tazhi, a writer who lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan and writes in Russian. According to the Press’s announcement, “Fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death figure frequently in these succinct poems, as do windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world “in the eye,” as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a “mystic community of communication.”

A beautiful bilingual book, produced with care and attention to white space around the poems, Paper-Thin Skin speaks to layers of loss–from personal and private to the loss of the country (I read these poems in the post-Soviet context) to climate change and the loss of habitats.

Translating Tazhi to English, Kates makes carefully weighted choices for clarity. In the example below, he changes the poet’s line “Чёрным вестям из нечёрного ящика” — literally “Black news from the not-black box” to read “At dark news from the bright box,” making sure that the English-speaking reader will understand the image of television. He makes this change with attention to the rhetoric device that the poet employs and finding an opportunity to create a sense of parallel and contrast in the image.

Pub Date: May 21, 2019

Publisher: Zephyr Press

Translator: J. Kates

The book has been reviewed by Eric Nguyen in Empty Mirror, Peter Gordon in Asian Review of Books, Alison Mandaville in World Literature Today, Zaure Bataeva on her blog.

National Translation Month 2019: Featured Excerpts from Russian, French, and Uzbek Literature in Translation — Academic Studies Press

Academic Studies Press has published an impressive sampler that includes excerpts from their upcoming books and back catalogue. I can’t help but wish the list included more female writers, but I’m intrigued by Luba Jurgenson’s work–she’s a fellow bilingual, combining Russian and French.

https://www.academicstudiespress.com/asp-blog/national-translation-month-2019

The books included are:

Farewell, Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works by Akram Aylisli, translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young

Night and Day by Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, translated from the Uzbek by Christopher Fort

Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse

Where There Is Danger by Luba Jurgenson, translated from the French by Meredith Sopher

21: Russian Short Prose from an Odd Century, edited by Mark Lipovetsky

The Raskin Family: A Novel by Dmitry Stonov, translated from the Russian by Konstantin Gurevich & Helen Anderson with a forward and afterword by Leonid Stonov

Russian Cuisine in Exile by Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis, translated from the Russian by Angela Brintlinger and Thomas Feerick

A Life at Noon | Slavica Publishers

A fascinating new book, in Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s translation, available for pre-order here.

“Azhigerei is growing up in Soviet Kazakhstan, learning the ancient art of the kuy from his musician father. But with the music comes knowledge about his country, his family, and the past that is at times difficult to bear. Based on the author’s own family history, A Life at Noon provides us a glimpse into a time and place Western literature has rarely seen as the first post-Soviet novel from Kazakhstan to appear in English.”