Category Archives: reviews

Praise for Olga Slavnikova’s 2017

By mbs | Published: April 20, 2010

Lots of good reviews have come in for my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s “rambunctious” (as Donna Seaman describes it for Booklist) novel, 2017: Seaman writes one of the most accurate descriptions of the book I’ve read: Strange things are happening in the rugged Riphean Mountains in this rambunctious novel of Russian society 100 years after [...]

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Kyle Semmel on Slavnikova’s 2017 for Three Percent

By mbs | Published: March 30, 2010

Kyle Semmel of the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, has given my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s 2017—just out from Overlook Press—a very nice review indeed: It’s hard not to think of twentieth-century Russian history as you crack open 2017, Olga Slavnikova’s Russian Booker Prize winning novel. The year 2017 will mark, of course, the 100th [...]

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Humor in the Human Condition

By mbs | Published: March 10, 2010

On the occasion of Yale University Press’s paperback edition of Oblomov, Katherine A. Powers has a glowing review in the Boston Globe: The expression “great comic novel” attached to a title usually causes me to drop everything and rush off to the library to secure what I consider to be one of the prime reasons [...]

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Slavic Professor Reviews White Guard

By mbs | Published: March 9, 2010

I was thrilled to read a very positive review of my translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard by Sidney Eric Dement of the University of Kansas in the Slavic and East European Journal.  He begins: In the course of their life in translation, the best novels shed their skin more than once. The time for [...]

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Mining the Human Landscape in Slavnikova’s 2017

By mbs | Published: January 13, 2010

Lizok’s Bookshelf has run the first review I’ve seen of my translation of Olga Slavnikova’s forthcoming novel, 2017, which Overlook Press is publishing in March: Olga Slavnikova’s Booker-winning 2017 is so tough to describe that I think I’ll do something very lazy and begin with words that compactly list some of its themes: rock hound, [...]

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Slate Picks Oblomov

By mbs | Published: November 18, 2009

The translator is always the last to know.  Slate chose my Oblomov translation as one of its Best Books of 2008!  Read about it here.  And be looking for the paperback edition, coming in February from Yale University Press.

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