Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States
Description
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.
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About the Author
Jeff Parker is the author of several books including Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (Harper Collins), the novel Ovenman (Tin House), and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc). He co-edited the anthologies Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House) and Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive). He also co-translated the novel Sankya (Dzanc) by Zakhar Prilepin from the Russian. He is the Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, and he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Reviews
"The seventh America is deeply repulsive to me. This is the America of informers, hypocrites, bureaucrats, and lawyers. The America of legal wrangling and civil suits, in the course of which irresponsible idiots are awarded huge amounts of money from companies that don't provide special useful instructions about their products for irresponsible idiots. An America of spurious, deceitfully interpreted political correctness, offensive to all participants in the process of human society. This is the America where a passerby will not even think of offering help to a person who is dying in the street, because they are afraid of being sued. I won't go on: it's boring and obnoxious to go through it all."--Max Frai, "Nine and a Half Americas"
