$25.00 hardcover / walker
- In a playground in Brooklyn, Artie Cohen is led to a dead girl tied up in duct tape on a children’s swing. He soon realizes the killer murdered the wrong girl—the intended victim was Valentina S verdloff, his friend Tolya’s daughter, long adored by Artie. Londongrad is the eighth Artie Cohen mystery by Reggie Nadelson, all of them with links to Russia and Brooklyn. This one may be the best, but others in the series, including Fresh Kills, Red Hook and Disturbed Earth, are entertaining and evocative of our home town.
$14.95 paperback / pegasus
- Reggie Nadelson was not the first to write about crime with a Russian angle. A Night in the Cemetery: And Other Stories of Crime and Suspense is an appeal collection of stories by Anton Chekhov, best known as one of his homeland’s foremost dramatists. Chekhov began his literary career as a crime and mystery writer. Scattered throughout periodicals and literary journals from 1880-1890, these early psychological suspense stories provide a fresh look into Chekhov’s literary heritage and his formative years as a writer.
$15.00 paperback / random house
- Still in the realm of classic Russian literature, when encounter Leo Tolstoy torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity and the reality of his enormous wealth, his 13 children, and a life of relative luxury. In The Last Station by Jay Parini, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home but is too ill to continue beyond the tiny rail station at Astapovo. He believes that he is dying alone, while over 100 newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition. A brilliant re-creation of the mind and tortured soul of one of the world’s greatest writers, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances between fact and fiction.
$15.00 paperback / FSG … on sale date 2/16/10
- Before leaving Tolstoy . . . no one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. In The Possessed, we watch Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.
$15.00 paperback / penguin
- Stepping ahead in time, vanishings and apparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt the stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol, in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today. The awesome collection is translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers.
$14.95 paperback / alma
- As the political intrigue of phantasmagorical post-communist reality develops into nightmare, the greed, cunning, and malice of the humans more and more resemble the behavior of the large communities of destructive rodents, while the rats acquire more and more human features. While clearly in the classical Russian tradition, The Rat Killer by Alexander Terekhov incorporate the more experimental and satirical aesthetic of Soviet writers such as Bulgakov, and as the narrator’s perception of reality becomes increasingly warped, so does our experience of the almost comically grotesque landscape around him.
$18.95 paperback / tin house
- Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present 23 depictions of the country from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time. Says author Francine Prose in the introduction: “What’s new is the rhythm and snap of the hip, modern, contemporary voices that we would expect to hear rattling into a cell phone in the booth next to ours, and the rendering of that voice into an English that’s as idiomatic and confident as we imagine these speakers to be.”
$15.00 paperback / UDP
- Ugly Duckling Presse has presented us with translations of contemporary Russian poetry, among them The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, a cycle of fast, tragic, unsettling, hilarious poems about the shortcomings of reason by Eugene Ostashevsky, and Red Shifting by Aleksandr Skidan. All are expertly translated with facing pages in Russian and English.