Gelasimov embraces the “show, don’t tell” dictum effectively throughout this short novel from the unique start. The first person narrator, later identified as Constantine or Kostya, has just returned to his home and is trying to fit a lot of bottles of vodka into his refrigerator, and on the window sill, on the floor, in the bathroom and clothes hamper. He’s planning a bender after having done some sort of work, work he’d completed to buy vodka. . . .

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The prize will be celebrated at the AWSS annual meeting and luncheon convention at the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies convention in Washington, DC, on Saturday, November 19, 2011, at its annual awards luncheon.

AmazonCrossing will be publishing my translation of Andrei Gelasimov’s Thirst in November, and to whet the public’s appetite they’re offering an excerpt from the novel, which you can download here.

Olga Slavnikova’s ‘2017,’ set on the anniversary of the revolution, is so packed full of ideas and images it threatens to explode.

And, she goes on to say,

Slavnikova’s strange, genre-defying novel, winner of the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, finally made it into English in Marian Schwartz’s luminous translation.

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In November 2007, hundreds of Russians filled the streets of Moscow to protest against Vladimir Putin, even though their government had made public demonstrations illegal. Valery Panyushkin, one of the nation’s most outspoken journalists, spoke with a dozen of those protestors for 12 Who Don’t Agree, including world chess champion Garry Kasparov, to draw out the personal accounts of what inspired them to take a stand… and how they fared against the inevitable crackdown.

For a long time the fact that the Krivovs drank was something only their son knew. When it began, Yurka had just started first grade. In the beginning, the Krivovs were embarrassed by their disease and drank together in their smoked-up apartment.  

Perched on the windowsill behind the curtain, Yurka would draw squiggles on his writing assignments, memorize the poem about "the forest, like a tower chamber painted" to the sound of his parents’ droning, and glue colored paper cutouts.

No one at school suspected a thing.  

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