Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States

by Mikhail Iossel, Mikhail Iossel (Editor), Mikhail Lossel

For half of the twentieth century, there were two superpowers in the world and a gulf of silence between them. Knowledge of Russian culture was based on propaganda and rumour, and their knowledge of the West was no better. When the Soviet Union fell, Russians began to travel to America more regularly, and what they discovered was a very different place to the one they had imagined, but, at the same time, not exactly the one that Americans think they know. This collection of beautifully written and entertaining literary essays by a wide range of Russian writers - young and old, funny and sombre, angry and celebratory, many being translated for the first time - offers readers a unique chance to see Americans in a whole new light, to question how the American dream stands up to the American reality, and to experience the wit and generosity of today's Russian writers.

Genres: Nonfiction

174 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2004

About the author

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986.

He is the author of Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling and one previous collection of fiction: Every Hunter Wants to Know.

A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, his stories and essays have also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Ecotone, Guernica, Tikkun, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

Iossel, a Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, has taught in universities throughout the United States and is an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

Reviews

[Leslie Levine Adler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the perspectives of this book and reading so many new authors. It's interesting to think of the context. It was published in 2004 and I'm guessing essays were written in 2002-3 after 9/11 during Bush administration and before Putin established his own regime. I would venture the essays would be very different now. I also thought it would have been useful to divide or perhaps have two separate volumes for those who emigrated, those who visited and those who never saw. I appreciated what Oleg Dark said about a change of land requires a changed state of mind but there is continual change has one moves from the position of other to feeling at home. Thank you editors for bringing these voices to a new audience.