One of the most prominent names in modern Russian
literature.--Publishers Weekly
Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter
and Peter--the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise--and tell
of the atrocities they've suffered, or that they've invented, or heard
from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence
intermingle with the interpreter's own reading: a his-tory of an ancient
Persian war; letters sent to his son Nebuchadnezzasaurus, ruler of a
distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer
who lived through Russia's wars and revolutions in the early part of the
twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union's dissolution.
Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian
literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions--of truth and
fiction, of time and timeless-ness, of love and war, of Death and the
Word--and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and
its uncountable joys.
Mikhail Shishkin is one of Russia's most prominent and respected
contemporary writers. When Maidenhair was published in 2005, it was
awarded both the National Bestseller Prize and the Big Book Prize.
Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian. The winner
of a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and
the Heldt Translation Prize, Schwartz has translated classic literary
works by Nina Berberova, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Bulgakov.
