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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
Published by Soho Press, Inc., 2018, 400 pages. This is more than just a crime novel: by setting it in India in the early 1900s, Sujata Massey paints a vivid portrait of the country and especially of the lives of the women at the time. The book starts in Bombay in 1921. The British are …
Published by Penguin and Oxford University Press, 1931, 361 pages. “I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own...”The Treasure of Abbot Thomas M.R. James is one of the best—if not the best—ghost story writer in the English language. Born in 1862, he …
Published by Penguin, 1995, 320 pages. This is a family memoir: by tracing the lives of her grandmother, mother and herself, Margaret Forster looks at how things have changed for working-class women in the UK. This book brings to light the hidden lives, lives often considered too unimportant to be documented. Forster’s grandmother, Margaret Ann, …
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