Published by Chatto & Windus, 2021, 304 pages. “Across the heart of Asia, at the ancient convergence of steppe and forest, the grasslands of Mongolia move towards Siberia in a grey-green sea. ... “Somewhere deep in this hinterland rises one of the most formidable rivers on earth. It drains a basin twice the size of …
Continue reading The Amur River—Between Russia and China: Colin Thubron
Published by Austin Macauly Publishers, 2022, 222 pages. Three girls playing in a forest are pestered by a young boy. When they cannot get rid of him, they throw him into a nearby river to teach him a lesson. They expect him to crawl out, repentant. But the boy drowns. When the girls realize they …
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 …
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