Married unhappily to a prominent member of her tight-knit Russian immigrant community, vivacious Anna K. engages in a reckless affair with an outsider on whom she has pinned fleeting hopes for freedom, while in a neighboring community, Bukharian-Jewish pharmacist Lev harbors a consuming love for Anna's cousin.

In twelve ‘pristine, entrancing’ (Booklist) linked stories, Ellen Litman introduces an unforgettable cast of Russian-Jewish immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world. Tender and wryly funny, these stories trace Masha's and her fellow immigrants' struggles to find a place in a new society—lonely seniors, families grappling with unemployment and depression, and young adults searching for love.

Three generations of women battle against the tides of history, from segregated 1950s America to the fall of the USSR and the rise of revolutionary Rojava.

Tanya Kagan, a rising specialist in Russian art, is trying to entice Russia’s wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden, unexplained departure of her husband. Suspenseful and beautifully written, The Imperial Wife asks whether we view female ambition any differently today than we did in the past.

Best friends Eva and Nika haven't seen or spoken for ten years, but now they're finally reunited—and forced to immediately go on the run. On the long journey from Rostov-on-Don to Vladivostok, they'll have to face FSB agents, gangsters, inclement weather, disease, hunger, and—most terrifying of all—their own past.

This book of short stories and miniatures by Vladimir Stepan strengthens his reputation as one of the best domestic masters of short prose. Laconic, transparent texts, in which there is not a single superfluous word, are made between artistic documentary and autofiction. At first glance, they belong to the tradition of pure realism, but upon careful reading it is easy to see that the author...

Experiencing unrequited love, the heroine of Daria Traiden's novel buys a village house in Belarus and begins renovating it. Transforming and inhabiting her own space on her native land is her strategy for preserving meaning. Reflecting on body, identity, poverty, violence, and family, the author searches for and reinvents her roots. Equally about love and home, the book explores the heartbreak...

‘Diary’ is a chronicle of the psychological breakdown of the country. The time of overturned destinies and burned-out feelings gives birth to a special literature, uncomfortable and disturbing. Here the author becomes general. Therefore, without a name, about everyone in the first person. ‘It's very difficult to write - everything is a stupor. Our current context adds to the senselessness - it...

Andrey Dudko's novel is a psychedelic parody of autofiction. The protagonist, a fake alter ego of the writer, abandons his family and job and retreats to the provincial town of Slonim to create a literary masterpiece in the solitude of his empty family home. However, alcohol, casual sex, and the phantoms of his childhood haunting the city hinder his creativity. Instead of writing, the...

‘The Biggest Ferris Wheel’ is a novel-autofiction in which real life, resembling fiction, blends with fantasy, resembling life. Simple and bright stories from life, brief love affairs that never developed into anything more, the painful experience of war, encounters with people identified by initials of varying degrees of obviousness—this motley narrative is brought together in touching...

‘Nine-Shoes’ is a collection of texts by Viktor Shenderovich, written in various (very different) years and serving as an artistic reflection on several eras in Russian life. For forty years—from the early Andropov era to the late Putin era—Shenderovich has been trying to answer the question of why the country never emerged from slavery and at what point we stopped hearing the warning signs. ‘I...