Love Like Water, Love Like Fire

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Product Details
Price
$16.99  $15.80
Publisher
Bellevue Literary Press
Publish Date
Pages
304
Dimensions
5.0 X 7.4 X 0.9 inches | 0.64 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781942658566

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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 two collections of fiction: Love Like Water, Love Like Fire and 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

Advance Praise for Love Like Water, Love Like Fire

"[A] vibrant collection. . . . With an ear for the clumsiness of Russian bureaucratic nomenclature, an eye for Kafkaesque humiliations, and a heart that embraces all the paradoxes of being a Soviet Jew, Iossel casts a spell over the reader. Reading like Sholem Aleichem updated by Bruce Jay Friedman, these stories reflect the exciting evolution of Russian Jewish literature." --Publishers Weekly

"[An] engaging collection. . . . While many stories illuminate the absurdity of Soviet society, Iossel conveys the brutal oppression of the surveillance state most intensely, and hauntingly, in the title story." --Kirkus Reviews

"Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is an extraordinary book: funny and profound, moving and provocative. Rarely has life in the former USSR (or anywhere, for that matter) been portrayed with such a rich admixture of soaring observation and finely rendered detail. This is a gorgeously constructed collection by one of our wittiest and most insightful writers." --Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

"Mikhail Iossel is a genius, a comic visionary in the tradition of Gogol, Keret, Barthelme, and Saunders. Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is a book of surprises and delights." --Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon

Select Praise for Mikhail Iossel

"Mikhail Iossel is an intense and thoughtful force for decency in the world." --George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Fox 8

"[Iossel's] point of view [is] a needed cocktail of rage, knowledge, unique personal experience, and hard-won humor." --Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Butterfly Lampshade

"Iossel has mastered his adoptive language so well that his English is not only impeccable but his own. It possesses an unmistakable voice: abrupt, suggestive and bleak." --Los Angeles Times