The 2017 NOS(E) Award Shortlist

I think the 2017 NOS(E) Award shortlist is (has to be! must be!) the last shortlist (or at least the last major shortlist) for the season. Despite enjoying shortlists, I’m full of hope because I have plenty of books to write about and, well, there’s so much overlap in the award posts this year that the fun started to fade long ago, even if copying and pasting makes it easy to write said posts…

And so, without further ado (as they say), here’s the ten-book list, which was announced late last week. Winners will be announced next February.

• Olga Breininger: В Советском Союзе не было аддерола (There Was No Adderal in the Soviet Union) certainly has a memorable title. Breininger’s originally from Kazakhstan but lives in Boston. The novel starts off mentioning a conference of Slavists… the book was longlisted for the Debut Prize in 2015.
• Aleksandr Brener: Жития убиенных художников (Life Stories [as in lives, in the context of “lives of saints”] of Killed Artists) was a NatsBest finalist. According to the publisher, Hylaea, the book is composed of brief stories/chapters about Brener’s experiences in various places around the world, looking at people, meetings, attachments, impressions… NatsBest jury reviews are here.
• Dmitrii Glukhovsky: Текст (Text) is described as a psychological thriller and criminal drama, among other things. Set in Moscow and apparently unpretentious and very present-day, both in terms of language and descriptions. One of you read it and reported enjoying it very much.
• Vladimir Medvedev: Заххок (part 1) (part 2) (Zahhak), which I’ve already read, is my kind of book. I love the polyphony of seven characters telling about troubled times in Tadzhikistan in the early 1990s and I love how Medvedev interweaves the events in his characters’ lives, blending recent history, archetypes (I don’t think I’m stretching the word too much), and good storytelling. It’s sad and brutal in more ways than one, and it’s an excellent book. Already a finalist for the Yasnaya Polyana and Booker.
• German Sadulaev: Иван Ауслендер (Ivan Auslender), also shortlisted for the Yasnaya Polyana Award, sounds like it’s about a middle-aged academic who gets pulled into politics and doesn’t like it… so he heads off to travel. Sadulaev is also very good at pulling current-day material into his books.
• Aleksei Salnikov: Петровы в гриппе и вокруг него (Severely tricky title alert, despite having already read a decent chunk of the book! The Petrovs in Various States of the Flu might capture things; this is literally something like “The Petrovs in and around the flu” though I could still be completely missing the point.), which is also a Big Book finalist. I’m reading it right now: it makes me laugh out loud at times and flu symptoms are aptly portrayed, though I wonder if the novel has enough momentum to…
• Vladimir Sorokin: Манарага (Manaraga), which I read (previous post) and enjoyed. Even if this isn’t Sorokin’s very best, it’s interesting, funny, and, yes, entertaining.
• Stanislav Snytko: Белая кисть (White Hand (or maybe Paintbrush? or even both?)). Apparently very brief texts with the intended effect of cinematic shots.
• Anna Tugareva: Иншалла. Чеченский дневник (God Willing. A Chechen Diary) sounds like it’s about Chechen history and identity.
• Andrei Filimonov: Головастик и святые (known in English as Manikin and the Saints) is represented by the Elkost literary agency so I’ll leave the description to them; it’s here. This book was also a NatsBest finalist; jury reviews are here.

To read judges’ opinions of the books, visit Colta.ru, here. There are lots of fun details.

Disclaimers: The usual. I translated excerpts from Zahhak. The NOS Award is a program of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation. The foundation also runs the Transcript grant program, which has supported many of my translations.

Up Next: Trip report on the American Literary Translators Association conference in Minneapolis and the Frankfurt Book Fair. Books: Zahhak. Anna Kozlova’s F20, about which my feelings are far more mixed. Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Tashkent Novel, which I enjoyed.