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Fiction/Non/Fiction: We’re All Russian, Now
In this episode of Fiction/Non/Fiction, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell discuss Russian-American political machinations with Ukrainian-born novelist Sana Krasikov, and novelist Charles Baxter...
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Writers of the Zodiac: Playful Gemini? You Have a Way With Words
The symbol representing Gemini, a pair of twins, seems to perfectly encapsulate what most people associate with the sign—duality (or, if we aren’t being poetic, two faced-ness). This symbol originates...
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I Was Almost Svetlana Alexievich’s Translator
I’d been earning my living as a Russian-English interpreter for a decade and a half when I was hired to give English voice to one Svetlana Alexievich, an author slated to appear at the 2005 PEN World...
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William Kentridge’s Provisional Memory, Provisional Words
Last week, acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge delivered the December 2018 Message from the Library, Brooklyn Public Library (BPL)’s commissioned public lecture series. Past speakers were...
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Svetlana Alexievich in Praise of Maxim Osipov
I love Maxim Osipov’s prose. I started rereading his stories and caught myself thinking that his prose now reads like something of a diagnosis: an accurate, unforgiving diagnosis of Russian life....
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10 Books You Should Read This July
Svetlana Alexievich trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (Random House) If God existed, or had an ear, she might listen the...
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New Books Tuesday: Your weekly guide to what’s publishing today, fiction and...
Every week, a new crop of great new books hit the shelves. If we could read them all, we would, but since time is finite and so is the human capacity for page-turning, here are a few of the ones we’ll...
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On Svetlana Alexievich: What Can a Book Do in the Face of War?
“Our village was set on fire in 1943… That day we were digging potatoes.” “The noise came from the sky. We heard the noise: rrrrr! This is the impression that remained from the first day of the...
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Writing About the Forgotten Black Women of the Italo-Ethiopian War
I own a picture of a young Ethiopian girl whom I have started to call Hirut. She is in her teens, and her hair is pulled away from her face and hangs down her back in thick braids. She wears a long...
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The 20 Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade
Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our...
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The Endless Memories Preserved in Siberia’s Ice
How can I be sleepy when the world is melting? my daughter asked at age nine the night Elizabeth Kolbert lectured at our local university, in response to my whispered We should go, you have school...
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100 Books That Defined the Decade
This is not a list of the best books of the decade. (This is, if you’re interested.) This is a list of books that, whether bad or good, were in one way or another defining for the last decade in...
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In Teaching Stories of Disaster, Hope Lies Hidden in Plain Sight
The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter. I am trying, standing in the door, To discover in the distant echoes What the coming years may hold in store. –Boris Pasternak, “Hamlet” (from the poems of...
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The dictator of Belarus is trying to silence Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
Alexander Lukashenko, the first and only president of Belarus, a man who is often referred to as Europe’s sole dictator, has been lashing out like a cornered animal since mass protests began in his...
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Voices of the People: 5 Books That Expand Our Ideas of Oral History
I became interested in oral history after encountering Studs Terkel’s Working and the early works of Svetlana Alexievich and even Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which could be read as the most...
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Revisiting Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War During Russia’s...
Welcome to Lit Century: 100 Years, 100 Books. Combining literary analysis with an in-depth look at historical context, host Catherine Nichols chooses one book for each year of the 20th century,...
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