The Wall in My Head -- Galleys Temporarily Online

Now’s your chance to test-read The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, an anthology edited by Words Without Borders and published by Open Letter Books. The book includes fiction, essays, documents, and a wide assortment of images. The Wall in My Head is scheduled for release on November 9, 2009, but galleys are available free online here for a limited time.

The blend of genres and former East Bloc countries makes The Wall in My Head look unusually browseable: the first items that popped out at me were a brief excerpt from Viktor Pelevin’s novel Омон Ра (Omon Ra), Masha Gessen’s “My Grandmother the Censor,” and “Farewell to the Queue,” by Vladimir Sorokin. Then I found a piece about the Plastic People of the Universe… and Irakli Iosebashvili’s “The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist”… and all those photos and other images that complement the texts...

FYI:

-The Words Without Borders Web site includes a number of pieces translated from Russian.

-Open Letter will be publishing Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson’s new translation of Ilya Ilf and Evgenii Petrov’s Золотой телёнок (The Golden Calf) in December 2009.