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Zina’s observations of her time in Detroit crystallize both a feeling of otherness and a wry critique of the young American activists who celebrated socialist ideas without fully appreciating the legacy of Soviet rule in Ukraine.
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I wanted to feel in control of something, but I didn’t know how to say that.
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To brand myself with something I feared and sought to subdue seemed like a reclamation.
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“I wanted every reader to see her or his own story.”
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“This novel is my most intimate and biographical.”
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Katya Apekina discusses her debut novel, THE DEEPER THE WATER THE UGLIER THE FISH.
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Jay Baron Nicorvo discusses his debut novel, The Standard Grand, how easy it is for civilians to forget about soldiers and veterans, and his longstanding love of animals.
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I think about the birth of Mosley, and all of the dreams I already have for him at the ripe age of one. I know how I want him to see me—strong, smart, capable of anything and everything. This is how I want him to see all women, but me especially.
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Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
...moreAn ad campaign by Penguin Random House in the UK meant to intrigue readers into purchasing classic books has instead sparked controversy for being anti-Russian. The ad features an unattributed line from the novel Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev: “Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles… Useless words! A Russian doesn’t need them.” Russian ex-pats living in London are questioning PRH’s motives in […]
...moreWhat’s one English word to sarcastically communicate Russian cosmopolitan refinement? How would you translate a page-long sentence from Tolstoy, or “the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky”? Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear (who have been married for 33 years) have translated over 30 works from Russian to English, beloved by readers worldwide (including Oprah) and praised […]
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Boris Fishman discusses his debut novel, A Replacement Life, Russia, the “immigrant novel,” Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, and Vladimir Putin.
...moreMore people were reading Tolstoy than any other author in translation at the beginning of the 20th century, but as late as the 1880s, few non-Russians had even heard of him. Translators were deterred partly because of the length of his works and complexities of language, not to mention his overwhelming Russian-ness. At the Financial Times, Rosamund […]
...more“When Nabokov started translating [his English-language memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book,” Pavlenko says. At NPR’s health blog, Shots, Alan Yu explores the controversial linguistic idea that the language(s) we […]
...moreAaron Gilbreath’s essay on smoking was recently translated into Russian by InsoSmI.ru, an organization in Russia that translates news, blogs, and essays from English into Russian. We think it’s pretty awesome that thanks to InsoSml.ru, our friends in Russia can now enjoy a slice of The Rumpus, too.
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