Translated from Estonian by Matthew HydePublished by Vagabond Voices, 2017, 176 pages. Original version published in 2015. On 20 August 1991, Estonia formally declared its independence from the Soviet Union, even as Soviet authorities were trying to crush this movement. Set during the last days of the Soviet Union in Estonia, The Death of the …
Continue reading The Death of the Perfect Sentence: Rein Raud
Published by Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins, 2001, 272 pages. “... I decided that I wanted to write a book about life. Just life itself. What I’ve learned by living more than seventy years of it. ... “I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the …
Published by Penguin/Random House, 2021, 384 pages. This is the story of a Ugandan family of Indian origin, told from the perspectives of two men: Hasan in 1960s Kampala, who writes letters to his dead wife, and Sameer, a young ambitious man in London in the mid-2000s. Hasan’s family is originally from Gujarat, but he …
Photo: Jennifer Croft Boris Dralyuk is a poet, literary translator, and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His collection of poems, My Hollywood and Other Poems, was published in April 2022. He has also written Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934; edited 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian …
Continue reading Bringing the Past to Life: Interview with Boris Dralyuk
Published by Paul Dry Books, 2022, 69 pages. Step into this book and be transported to Hollywood, a city of émigrés and faded glamour. It is a city that is constantly changing, where the old is demolished to make way for the new, and where what was once fêted is now forgotten. In the first …
Continue reading My Hollywood and Other Poems: Boris Dralyuk
Published by Granta Books and Hogarth Press, 2021, 304 pages. This is a story about loss and obsession, about ghosts from the past and the violence of war. Krishan gets a call one day informing him of the death of Rani, his grandmother’s caregiver. The funeral is to be held in a village in northern …
Translated from Russian by Boris DralyukPublished by MacLehose Press, 2021, 352 pages. Original version published in 2018. Set in the period after the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, this book by Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov is particularly timely, given the war that is now unfolding in Ukraine. Sergey Sergeyich lives in Little Starhorodivka, an almost …
Published by Harvill Secker, 2011, 400 pages. “The circus arrives without warning. “No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.” And just as suddenly as it appeared, it is gone. Welcome to Le Cirque des Rêves, or the …
Photo: David Stanton Rosemary J. Brown is a journalist based in London and author of Following Nellie Bly: Her Record-Breaking Race Around the World. Rosemary is an avid traveller and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, where she helped organize the first Heritage of Women in Exploration conference. Her articles have appeared in publications including …
Continue reading Putting Women Explorers Back on the Map: Interview with Rosemary J. Brown
Translated from Uzbek and Russian by Shelley Fairweather-VegaPublished by Tilted Axis Press, 2019, 446 pages. Original version published in 2001. “Life in exile! May it be cursed. Once you have become a stranger, a stranger you shall remain; you may endeavour to make friends, but the task is a difficult one, full end to end …
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