Women in Translation, 2020

August may be almost gone but it’s still Women in Translation Month for another day and a half, meaning I’m going to hop to it and write up a rather rambling post with some rather random bits of news about Russian books by women that are on their way to anglophone readers. “Random” really is the word here: this is a pretty nonmethodical (perhaps even slipshod) look at some personal favorites and news, as well as a couple of interesting cases of certain writers who have multiple new translations on the way.

I’ll start with Katherine E. Young’s translation of Anna Starobinets’s Look at Him, which will be out soon from Three String Books, an imprint at Slavica Publishers. I’m mentioning Look at Him first because the book, a memoir of sorts, made such an impression on me when I read it back in 2018 (previous post). Starobinets is particularly known for writing fictional horror stories but here she tells the true story of her own experiences, many of which are utterly horrifying, when she terminated a pregnancy. For more: Svetlana Satchkova’s interview with Starobinets on Punctured Lines.

There seem to be lots of other translations on the way but please note that I have yet to do much work on this year’s new translation list so may be missing some good and very imminent books. That said, the work I have done is more than enough to know that there’s been some significant slippage in publication dates, likely due to the pandemic. So! Among the other books by women that are in progress, we have three books by Maria Stepanova: the poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, translated by Sasha Dugdale and on the way from Bloodaxe Books in March 2021; In Memory of Memory, fiction translated by Sasha Dugdale and published by New Directions (U.S.) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (U.K.) in February 2021; and The Voice Over, a selection of poems and essays edited by Irina Shevelenko that’s scheduled for publication with Russian Library/Columbia University Press in June 2021.

Another big bright spot is the list at Deep Vellum, whose Will Evans told RusTRANS of a slew of books on the way: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s novel Kidnapped: A Crime Story, translated by Marian Schwartz, and The New Adventures of Helen & Other Magical Tales, translated by Jane Bugaeva; an autobiographical novel by Nataliya Meshchaninova translated by Fiona Bell; and Alisa Ganieva’s Offended Sensibilities, translated by *checking on the name*. The RusTRANS blog page also includes a post with a note by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp mentioning that she’s translating one of Yulia Yakovleva’s detective novels; Ruth’s Web site lists the title as Punishment of a Hunter (previous post, where, NB, I used a provisional title); the book is on the way from Pushkin Press in 2021.

For a more historical form of WIT fun, I really love this list of “25 Books by Women in Translation From the Russian Language” on Reading With KT. Yes, I’m very grateful a few of my translations are included and just as glad to see some wonderful translations by colleagues, but I’m especially happy that the list contains two Soviet-era classics that I’ve enjoyed: Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna (previous post) is a book I’ve read several times and would recommend to anyone, and Natalya Baranskaya’s A Week Like Any Other, which I’ve only read once (or maybe twice, once in each language?) but ordered up after reading KT’s post. (Languagehat, by the way, was reading A Week (post here) the same week I read the Reading With KT blog post.) For another list of Russian women writers’ books available in translation, here’s A Russian Affair’s (shorter) list, which includes Banine’s Days in the Caucasus, for Pushkin Press, translated from the French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, who also has a note on RusTRANS. (Alas, I just found this book isn’t available in the U.S. until next year.) If I were to add one personal favorite to those two lists, it would be Julia Voznesenskaya’s The Women’s Decameron, which I’ve mentioned a couple times over the years. I read it first in W.B. Linton’s translation, then again in Russian. I bought a copy in Moscow but, another alas here: the box containing that book got lost somewhere between Moscow and Maine. I’d love to think someone swiped the box solely because the Voznesenskaya book was in there.

Finally, on a more personal note, it’s been a nice year for translations of women! Narine Abgaryan’s Three Apples Fell From the Sky, which I translated for Oneworld Publications, was published and made the Read Russia Prize (anglophone!) longlist. It was also the March book club selection on Asymptote.com; I answered some fun interview questions for Asymptote’s Josefina Massot, here. I’m currently translating Maria Galina’s Autochthons (previous post), which never let me go over the years – it’s the perfect puzzling book to translate in this strange time; the translation is for Russian Library/Columbia University Press. In other good news, my translation of Guzel Yakhina’s Zuleikha made the shortlists of the EBRD Literary Prize and the Read Russia Prize (anglophone again!). Turning to potential future translations: I translated excerpts of two novels written by women: Anna Kozlova’s Rurik (previous post) and Daria Desombre’s The Birdcatcher, which I haven’t posted about but enjoyed very much and then came to love even more when I translated excerpts: not only did it draw on my BFF feelings for War and Peace, it reminded me of studying eighteenth-century Russian literature, particularly sentimentalism. The Birdcatcher is a historical crime novel (with elements of coming-of-age blended in) set in Russia during the War of 1812 and it features a young Russian woman whose family’s rural estate ends up housing French officers. Desombre has also written contemporary detective novels featuring a young woman, Masha Karavai: Shelley Fairweather-Vega translated The Sin Collector for Amazon Crossing. I read another Masha Karavai book early on in the pandemic and found it good light reading that actually keep me reading (I was having a lot of trouble reading at the time), though it made me very wistful about missing Moscow. On another note, a more Petersburg note, it’s a wonderful plus that one of the best books I’ve read this year is Ksenia Buksha’s Churov and Churbanov (previous post); Anne O. Fisher translated a chunk that’s available here. Which leads me to another book written by a woman…

Up Next: Inga Kuznetsova’s Промежуток, which I thoroughly enjoyed, is up next. I’m not sure what will come after that since I’m reading two books, one printed, the other electronic. We’ll see which I finish first!

Disclaimers and disclosures: The usual, particularly knowing some of the translators, writers, and publishers mentioned in this post.

National Bestseller Award Nominees for 2020

What better to think about on a cold, windy, sunny (yester)day than the 2020 list of 47 National Bestseller Award nominees? This year’s list seems a bit unusual for its lack of repeat nominations – books nominated by more than one person – and I think (suspect?) there are more unfamiliar names for me than usual. The new-to-me names (as well as the lesser-known publishers) are what I find so much fun about NatsBest. Alexander Pelevin’s The Four, a 2019 NatsBest finalist, was one of the most interesting books I read last year and I hadn’t known of either A. Pelevin or his publisher, Пятый Рим/Fifth Rome. NatsBest will announce its 2020 shortlist on April 16. For now, “Big Jury” reviews are already starting to appear on the NatsBest site. Here a few of the nominees…

Starting with books I’ve already read:

• Liubov Barinova’s Ева (Eve) (previous post) tells of a killing and a kidnapping.
• Mikhail Elizarov’s Земля (Earth) (previous post) tells, over more than 750 packed pages, of life and death. And that’s only volume one!
• Dmitry Zakharov’s Средняя Эдда (Middle Edda) tells of a street/graffiti artist (Banksyesque) whose work has political twists and consequences. (I’m still reading, so this is a bit of a cheat.) I’d been looking forward to Middle Edda since I knew it would be very contemporary, but I’m finding it rather confusing because so many characters are doing so many things so very quickly. (I see that critic Galina Yuzefovich had a similar complaint about the book.) Most distressing, Middle Edda doesn’t even feel especially fresh, as literature, though it’s too early to say for sure.
• Anna Kozlova’s Рюрик (Rurik) (previous post) tells of a boarding school student who hitches a ride with a motorcyclist and goes missing. Another big favorite from 2019, Rurik really did feel fresh.

Continuing with books I was already interested in reading:

• Evgenia Nekrasova’s Сестромам (Sistermom) is a story collection; I’ve read and appreciated some of the stories already.
• Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina’s Уран (Uranium) is apparently a documentary novel about events at and around the Sillamäe uranium plant in 1953.

Books by authors I’d never heard of is a big category this year, though not many of them (I’m limiting myself to books that are available now in printed form, not manuscripts) intrigue me enough to put them on a “buy-or-borrow” list. That said, several more almost made this chunk of my post because they sound suitably odd. I really do like odd. Belkin’s book about famous people (the великие/major/big of his title) and animals (the мелкие/minor/small of the title) – e.g. Dostoevsky and bedbugs, Napoleon and bees – sounds like it could be strange enough that it just might work. Here are a few that sound especially promising for the likes of me:

• Tatyana Zamirovskaya’s Земля случайных чисел (The Land of Random Numbers) sounds like it’s about alternate universes and/or realities. Just my thing.
• Boris Kletinich’s Моё частное бессмертие (My Personal Immortality) sounds like a polyphonic novel that covers lots of twentieth-century history. Also just my thing?
• Vladimir Mironenko’s Алёшины сны (Alyosha’s Dreams) is apparently a mystical history tour that includes Rasputin (Grigory) and apocalypse. This definitely sounds like my thing.

Rasputin and apocalypse seem like a good note to end on before more snow and rain fall. Stay warm and dry, wherever you are!

Up Next: Those oft-promised books in English, to which I’ve added a third. Zakharov’s Middle Edda.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I have translated/am translating excerpts from several of the books on this year’s NatsBest list of nominees. I’ve received copies of some books on this year’s list from literary agents and/or authors and have ties to some nominators, authors, and agents, as well as the award’s secretary.

Girls Gone Missing: Kozlova’s Rurik and Barinova’s Eve

Where to start? The basics, I suppose: Anna Kozlova’s Рюрик (Rurik) and Liubov Barinova’s Ева (Eve) are both books about young women who disappear, one forever, the other for a hiatus of sorts. Both novels are also described by some readers (and/or publicists!) as thrillers, though after corresponding with a Russian colleague a bit about Eve, I suppose something like “psychological dramas” is probably more apt. Sometimes I think “thriller” puts too much pressure on a book to be a page-turner that has to be read in one sitting. Not that that’s an option for me, given how slowly I read Russian, but Rurik and Eve kept me up at night because I wanted to find out what happened to Marta (in Rurik), Eve (in Eve), and their family members.

Despite the common element of suspense and missing women, the books couldn’t be more different in terms of plot, atmosphere, and tone. I’ve described Rurik as “edgy” (on the first page, there’s mention of how people “пьют, ссут и блюют” – “drink, piss, and puke” – on local trains: the three words transliterate as pyut, ssut, blyuyut, which sounds great but obviously smells awful) with plenty of drinking, sex, a parrot named Rurik, motorcycle riding, and a weird and horrid death. Rurik has tons of verve and a bit of grit, too; it’s both wise and wiseass. It’s a very here-and-now novel examining social mores and wealth (the motorcycle is a BMW, for example, and there’s overseas vacationing) while also depicting the role of the media and Internet in modern life after Marta, a teenager who’s vanished, hitches a ride north with a motorcyclist. She later escapes him (going into the woods, ah, favorite Russian motif!), too, giving two reasons for suspense: a) finding out why she fled the first time and b) wondering if she’ll survive the forest. (Where I was glad there were good insect mentions.) The cast also includes a very modern journalist, a woman who figures everything out, and (of course) there’s a dysfunctional family background.

As there is in Eve: Eve and her brother Herman live with their cold army officer of a father who first has a soldier nanny them – when they go with the soldier into the forest (the forest again!) to cut a holiday tree, Herman’s foot is severely injured by a trap – but then hands them over to their grandmother for care. As an adult, Eve is killed and then, as payback, Herman kidnaps her killers’ daughter and raises her by himself. Told in two timelines, the main source of suspense for me in Eve was in learning how Eve died, finding out Herman’s deep-seated motivations, and seeing what consequences he might face. Meaning: Will he eventually be caught? And why were Eve and Herman so close? Barinova’s writing and plotting are pretty traditional and with Eve’s overall slice of time covering the late Soviet period until the present day, it has a grayer feel, in part because Herman, who becomes a doctor, can’t afford a BMW or overseas travel but also because the novel itself is quieter than Rurik, which felt pretty raucous in many ways. Eve is just plain bleak, though not so bleak that I’d call it chernukha, the dark, dark brand of realism I used to read so much of.

Neither Eve nor Rurik is perfect – both suffer from overly long passages in the middle (thankfully, though, there are no big muddles in the middle) and I thought the feel of much of Eve’s denouement departed too much from the textual logic of everything that preceded it, though the very, very end felt fitting – but, as I’ve mentioned, both books kept me up late, happily reading and wanting to know what would happen next, as decent psychological-dramas-that-verge-on-thrillerdom should. Having relatively recently read Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, which I had to ration out to myself; Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, which I devoured in one evening (in Sam Taylor’s smooth translation); and the beginning of Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, which is currently keeping me plodding noirishly on the treadmill, I think it’s safe to say I love novels that play with literary and genre norms, blending suspense and, yes, psychological drama with social issues like loneliness, alcoholism, and class while also straddling the (artificial) boundaries between the (artificial) lands of genre fiction and literary fiction.

Rurik and Eve are similar to those books I read in English: there are broken families and broken social fabrics that essentially generate orphandom in and around transitional times for contemporary Russia, meaning the two books describe personal and social issues while also playing a little with literary and genre norms. Best of all, they’re part of a growing pile of books by youngish writers (Eve is Barinova’s debut) who aren’t afraid to blend – particularly in Kozlova’s case – everything from bits of mysticism and folklore to social commentary and crime. I think I was especially grateful to read two new releases that are so focused on the present-day and late Soviet period rather than the first half of the twentieth century. And to appreciate Kozlova’s sassy delivery, acidic irony, and 18+ content as well as Barinova’s calm, almost plodding and meditative restraint. My biggest regret is that Rurik didn’t make any award shortlists: even with the slight sagginess I mentioned, Rurik feels better composed and more relevant (and interesting!) than some of this year’s other Big Book finalists. I have to wonder if the juries choosing finalists didn’t much admire the edginess and sassiness I so happily lapped up.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. I received an electronic copy of Eve from Barinova’s literary agency BGS, for whom I have translated a few brief excerpts of Eve. I bought my copy of Rurik, which a friend brought to me from Moscow. I do want to mention how nice this Phantom Press edition is, thanks to Andrei Bondarenko’s sleek design (which both looked nice and made the text especially reader-friendly for tired end-of-the-day eyes) and thick, creamy paper. Bondarenko’s designs always have nice touches: Alisa Ganieva’s long biography of Lilya Brik (published by Molodaya Gvardia, which opted for nice paper, too) was also especially easy on the eyes, both in terms of aesthetics and ease of reading, thanks to Bondarenko’s body text format and graphic elements. Good book design matters.

Up Next: The two books in English I keep promising, Ganieva’s Lilya Brik biography, a biography of Venedikt Yerofeyev, and Evgeny Chizhov’s new book about nostalgia and memory, which I just started.

Happy New Year! & 2017 Highlights

Happy New Year! С Новым годом! I hope you are enjoying the holiday and staying warm, wherever you are!

In terms of the year in books, 2017 seems (logically enough, I suppose) to fit the pattern of the last couple of years: lots of work on translations plus a quality-not-quantity situation with my reading. This year, however, brought some unexpected travel and more books than I ever thought I’d receive in a year. A few highlights… 

Two favorite books by authors new to me: Vladimir Medvedev’s Заххок (Zahhak), which I’ll be writing about soon, is the polyphonic novel set in Tajikistan that I’d been rooting for to win either the Yasnaya Polyana or Booker award. And then there’s Anna Kozlova’s F20 (previous post), which won the National Bestseller Award: F20 is harsh and graphic in depicting mental illness and societal problems. Its feels even more necessary to me a couple months after reading; it has really stuck with me.

Favorite book nobody else seems to like by an author I’d already read: Vladimir Sorokin’s Manaraga (previous post) may not be his best book—it’s tough to beast (ha!) his Oprichnik—but that doesn’t mean it’s not a smart, entertaining book that I loved zipping through. I feel a special gratitude to Sorokin for creating a body of work that lets the reader find common themes (sometimes, admittedly, too familiar) in his books and make connections that enhance the reading.

Favorite book other readers like by an author I’d already read: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Kaleidoscope (previous post), which is my favorite of the year, though I think of it as a 2016 book because that’s when I started it: in fact, I vividly remember reading it as I greeted 2017. Not many 800-page books work for me (see below) but this one’s so nicely structured and rooted in the canon and, hmm, human sentiments and reality, too, that I didn’t want it to end.

Least favorite trend & most favorite way to react: I won’t list titles but I ran across far too many books that felt unjustifiably long because of lack of structure and/or editing. On the positive side, I’ve been reading short stories as an antidote. Sergei Nosov gave me his collection Полтора кролика (A Rabbit and a Half) when I was in St. Petersburg and the first story, “Морозилка” (“The Freezer”), is, appropriately enough, set at New Year’s and involves the retelling of a scary story. It has a nice combination of tenderness, humor, and suspense: I read the beginning in the Metro in Petersburg and was sorry I didn’t have enough time to finish because my ride was too short. Another story from the collection, “Шестое июня” (“The Sixth of June”) was a favorite in the Petersburg Noir collection (previous post). I also got started on Elena Dolgopyat’s Родина (Motherland), which starts off with an updated, transplanted “Overcoat”-themed story… short stories feel like the perfect counterbalance to untrimmed novels that just don’t warrant 500 or more pages.

Favorite unexpected developments: My trips to Frankfurt for the Buchmesse and St. Petersburg, for the Cultural Forum, were both almost painfully wonderful (previous post), for the opportunity to see so many friends and colleagues from all over. And I was thrilled that my translation of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina, for Oneworld Publications, was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Saddest moment: The death of Vladimir Makanin. I’m not sure I would have started writing this blog if it hadn’t been for the dearth of English-language information about his books. They deserve more attention.

PEN book pile, with cat ear in foreground.

Happiest things: There were some almost transcendental moments during travel—a dance party in a glass cylinder of a club, a wee-small-hours-of-the-morning tour of St. Peterburg thanks to a quirky taxi driver who wanted me to see more—and now there’s the ongoing happiness of reading dozens of books I received over the year. Authors and organizations gave me lots of books in Russian during the year, and, as a judge for the PEN Translation Prize, I received over 125 books in English translation. Reading them is a serious treat, particularly because so many of them are books I might never have heard of or picked up otherwise.

What’s coming up in 2018: There are lots of books on the shelves that I just didn’t get to in 2017: Sergei Kuznetsov’s Учитель Дымов (The Teacher Dymov, I think), Olga Slavnikova’s Прыжок в длину (Long Jump), and Dmitrii Novikov’s Голомяное пламя, the Booker finalist I’m not quite sure what to call, maybe Flame Over the Open Sea. There are also a few books in English I’m hoping/planning to get to sooner rather than later, including Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M., which I haven’t even bought yet, lest it distract me from the rest of my PEN reading; and City Folk and Country Folk, by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov, which Columbia University Press already sent to me. I’m also excited to have some translations coming out in 2018, starting with Eugene Vodolazkin’s The Aviator, for Oneworld in May. I’m reading proofs and making final edits now… I can’t think about much beyond that for now!

Thank you! Finally, a very hearty thank you to everybody who visits the blog, whether regularly or occasionally. I’m glad something drew you to Russian literature and brought you here! Special thanks to the numerous organizations and individuals who did so many nice things for me in 2017, whether that was treating me to coffee, borscht, advice, or books, or making my travel possible, as the Institute of Translation and the Yeltsin Center did. Here’s wishing all of you a very happy 2018 filled with fun books (structured to your taste, though emphatically not “taste” in the Manaraga sense…) and good health. Happy New Year!

Up next: Sukhbat Aflatuni’s lovely Tashkent Novel and Vladimir Medvedev’s polyphonic Zahhak…

Disclaimers: The usual, with, as mentioned above, special thanks to many people and organizations for books and travel.

Image credit: Fireworks in Bratislava, New Year 2005, from Ondrejk, via Wikipedia.

Anna Kozlova’s Sharp F20

Anna Kozlova’s F20, which won this year’s National Bestseller Award, feels like an antidote to a lot of things. Back in October, it was the perfect book for fighting inevitable boredom (not to mention weird service) on a transatlantic flight. And thinking now about Kozlova’s fictional account of rough realities—which also have a very darkly humorous side—makes a startling counterpoint to treacly Christmas music at the grocery store and posh holiday gift lists. F20 is smart, immediate, and relevant, making it a harsh but necessary reminder of personal and societal ills. The fact that F20 won the NatsBest is also a nice antidote to this year’s Big Book shortlist, which is both mysteriously lackluster and absurdly all-male… despite F20 making the Big Book longlist.

F20 is the medical code for schizophrenia. Kozlova’s narrator, the teenage Yulia, and her younger sister Anyutik both seem to have it, though only Anyutik, whose symptoms are more obvious, has been formally diagnosed. Yulia opens up right from the start, telling us on F20’s first page that there are broken locks on the little suitcase of genes she and Anyutik received. They come from a broken family, too, and are growing up with their grandmother, their mother, and her boyfriend Tolik, someone she knew way back when… and then ran into years later when she brought Anyutik to the psychiatric clinic for a shot. Tolik and Anyutik share a diagnosis.

To call F20 sad, depressing, or heartbreaking doesn’t get at half of what Kozlova achieves: the novel is all that but it’s flickers of humor, humanness, absurdity, and even suspense that raise it above simple chernukha, that pitch-black dark reality I’ve often found so compelling. Yulia describes cutting German words into her foot when the going gets tough. Anyutik says their mother never should have given birth to them. Yulia decides early on that she has no future or potential. Anyutik’s “best” voices of the six she hears come from a talking dog (shades of Gogol?) and Pushkin. Medication helps, however, and Anyutik serves as her older sister’s pharmacist. Anyutik’s a veritable PDR, knowledgeable on doses and side effects. Toward the end of the book, Yulia serves as a home health aide to an elderly woman and makes a comment about a generation gap in perceptions of carnations, a once-popular flower, now outmoded. The combination of details co-existing in F20 gives the book an almost documentary aesthetic.

Meanwhile, in the story’s longer arc, Yulia is growing up, having sex (and often uses graphic language, something I’ve seen criticized by readers; it’s a criticism I don’t share), learning to drink heavily, and not always coming home. Also meanwhile, Yulia’s grandmother accuses Yulia’s mother of being too permissive and Yulia’s mother even wonders where she and Yulia’s Polish boyfriend’s parents went wrong: why do their children smoke, drink, and have sex? She wonders how they could have allowed that but at least some of the answers seem pretty obvious: maybe the parents didn’t start picking up vices as early in life as their kids, but the four of them manage to knock back a bottle of vodka in forty minutes during a two-family summit. And the boyfriend’s parents even have a fistfight. None of this (none of this!) struck me as unlikely in Kozlova’s telling. Another scene ensues later on, when Yulia and Anyutik’s father visits… and the problems clearly go beyond these two families.

Although certain twists toward the end of F20 felt a tiny bit off to me—the denouement with the elderly client seemed a little hasty, as did Yulia’s visit with her father—that doesn’t negate the book’s effect. I still believe Yulia when she says she is (a) reality and nobody needs her. And I still feel her aloneness in the world, something she mentions after she’s carved the word finsternis into herself. NatsBest jury member Roman Senchin—whom I see as a master of chernukha, thanks to his The Yeltyshevs—wrote that Kozlova’s writing is “увлекательно написанная жуть” (roughly “fascinatingly written awfulness”), which is just right because what happens is awful but it’s also horribly absorbing. Even if you don’t read Russian, the paragraph he cites in his review—and, yes, I do believe his claim that he selected it randomly—has simple enough syntax that even an online translator will give you a sense of Kozlova’s talent for making such awful things so fascinating and so absorbing. I think it’s safe to say the paragraph also displays why Senchin cites critic Lev Danilkin, who called Kozlova’s writing “ультрашоковая,” “ultrashocking.” The combination of real storytelling and that shock makes for a reading experience that’s both engrossing and worthwhile, something (not to keep grousing but…) I wish I’d felt in more of my 2017 Big Book reading.

Disclaimers: The usual. NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental wrote Masha Regina, which I translated. Not a disclaimer, but huge thanks to translator Reilly Costigan-Humes, who came to the 2017 ALTA conference bearing books from Moscow for a bunch of book-starved, US-based translators he had never even met… This was a very generous thing to do—printed books are heavy, after all—and I’m especially grateful because F20 was among the books he hauled. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Reilly and his translation partner Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler in Minneapolis: they’ve already translated Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad (previous post on Zaven Babloyan’s Russian translation that I read) and they’re working on Lena Eltang’s Cartagena (another previous post). Hmm, they seem to like books with toponym titles. You can read more about Reilly and Isaac here.

Up next: Russian Booker and Big Book Award winners. Sukhbat Aflatuni’s lovely Tashkent Novel; Vladimir Medvedev’s polyphonic Zahhak; and Yulia Yakovleva’s entertaining Tinker, Tailor (Вдруг охотник выбегает), which is set in Leningrad.

NatsBest goes to Kozlova for F20

Anna Kozlova won the 2017 National Bestseller award yesterday for her novel F20, about a teenager with schizophrenia. I wasn’t surprised that F20 won: Kozlova’s book collected the most points in the NatsBest’s first round of voting. That’s not to say the ceremony wasn’t suspenseful… F20 was tied 2-2 with Aleksandr Brener’s Жития убиенных художников (Life Stories [as in lives, in the context of “lives of saints”] of Killed Artists), leaving jury chair Konstantin Ernst as the tie breaker. He cast his vote for F20. Two other books received votes: Elena Dolgopyat’s Родина (Motherland) and Andrei Filimonov’s Головастик и святые (known in English as Manikin and the Saints).

If you’d like to watch, the award ceremony is archived on YouTube here. 

For more: A Fontanka article by Elena Kuznetsova.

Up Next: The Big Book shortlist, which I’ll be setting up to post tomorrow/Monday. The Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist. Then more books… including futurism.

Disclaimers: NatsBest secretary Vadim Levental is the author of Masha Regina, which I translated.