Lora Maslenitsyna

Dec 3, 2024 | publicbooks.org | Lora Maslenitsyna |Charlotte Rosen

“Dark are the days ahead of us / and even darker—the nights.” These words—written just as Russian forces began to pour into Ukraine in 2022—were how Ukrainian American poet Oksana Maksymchuk described, in her poem “Genesis,” the bleakness of existing during times of war. Her poems and writings—collected in Still City—make clear that what defines the 21st century is catastrophe.

Apr 16, 2024 | wordswithoutborders.org | Lora Maslenitsyna |Chiara Marchelli |Ruth Kemp |Kelly Zhang

Tradition and modernity are locked in a miserable marriage in Baqytgul Sarmekova’s short story collection To Hell with Poets. The children of this union spend their lives in Kazakhstan’s auls bursting with gossip, lonely apartments in the sprawling capital of Astana, and at busy markets. Sarmekova’s characters attempt to broker a peace with their circumstances but often meet tragic consequences. Occasionally, and perhaps by no act of their own, they encounter brief glimmers of a conceivable future.

Dec 27, 2023 | full-stop.net | Lora Maslenitsyna

[New Directions; 2023]Tr. from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer RussellOlga Ravn begins her newest novel, My Work, with an unexpected question: “Who wrote this book?” The narrator is quick to assuage her startled reader. She wrote the book, of course. Only, did she? The unnamed narrator tells us that she has found a journal written by a woman named Anna, written during Anna’s pregnancy.

Nov 22, 2023 | full-stop.net | Lora Maslenitsyna

[New Directions; 2020]My mother’s favorite word in English is “stuff.” After immigrating to California from the recently disintegrated Soviet Union and learning English from scratch in her early thirties, she was quickly smitten with the word, which doesn’t exist in quite the same way in the Russian language. Stuff is ineffable and illegible, totalizing and abstract. It can name a single object or many, or even a concept that has no physical corpus whatsoever.

Sep 18, 2023 | full-stop.net | Lora Maslenitsyna

[New Directions; 2023]Tr. from the Japanese by Polly BartonIn a 1931 speech to the National Society for Women’s Service, Virginia Woolf confessed that the first time she was paid for her writing, she didn’t use the money on any of the necessities of life: food, shoes, or rent. Instead, she bought a cat: “What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits?” asks Woolf.