"Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia"

New from Tin House Books: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia edited by Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker.

About the book, from the publisher:

Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present twenty-three depictions of the new Russia from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time.

“What’s new is the rhythm and snap of the hip, modern, contemporary voices that we would expect to hear rattling into a cell phone in the booth next to ours, and the rendering of that voice into an English that’s as idiomatic and confident as we imagine these speakers to be.... How fortunate we are ... that we now have Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia.”
—from the introduction by Francine Prose

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR, where he belonged to a circle of underground (“samizdat”) writers. He emigrated to the United States in 1986 and is currently the coordinator of the creative writing program of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. The author of Every Hunter Wants to Know (W.W. Norton), a collection of stories, and coeditor of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive), his fiction has been translated into several languages and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University. In 1998 he founded Summer Literary Seminars, Inc.—one of the world’s largest international literary conferences: www.sumlitsem.org.

Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman and the collection The Back of the Line and the coeditor of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States. He served as the program director of Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is currently the acting director of the Master’s Program in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.