Yelena Shmulenson
Author
Series
The Revolution of Marina M volume 1
Language
English
Description
"St. Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916. Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn. As her country goes through almost unimaginable upheaval,...
Author
Series
The Revolution of Marina M volume 2
Language
English
Description
After the events of The Revolution of Marina M., the young Marina Makarova finds herself on her own amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War---pregnant and adrift in the Russian countryside, forced onto her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child. She finds new strength and self-reliance to fortify her in her sojourn, and to prepare her for the hardships and dilemmas still to come. When she finally returns to Petrograd,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Sisters Vera and Marya were brought up as good Soviets: obedient despite hardships of poverty and tragedy, committed to communist ideals, and loyal to Stalin. Several years after fighting on the Eastern front, both women find themselves deep in the mire of conflicts shaping a new world order in 1947 Berlin. When Marya, an interpreter, gets entangled in Vera's cryptic web of deceit and betrayal, she must make desperate choices to survive - and protect...
Author
Language
English
Description
Born to a Russian family of lower nobility, Xenia, an eccentric dreamer who cares little for social conventions, falls in love with Andrei, a charismatic soldier and singer in the Empress's Imperial choir. Though husband and wife adore each other, their happiness is overshadowed by the absurd demands of life at the royal court and by Xenia's growing obsession with having a child-- a desperate need that is at last fulfilled with the birth of her daughter....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age twenty-two--right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now forty-six and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, War's Unwomanly Face is Svetlana Alexievich's collection of stories of women's experiences in World War II, both on the front lines, on the home front, and in occupied territories. This is a new, distinct version of the war we're so familiar with. Alexievich gives voice to women whose stories are lost in the official narratives, creating a powerful alternative history from the personal...
8) The shawl
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A short story and a novella which, together, tell an exquisitely powerful and moving tale of the Holocaust. Both The Shawl and Rosa won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories.
Author
Language
English
Description
"A riveting novel about two women--one Serbian, one Bosnian--whose friendship spans decades and continents, war and peace, love and estrangement, in the vein of Elena Ferrante and Julia Alvarez. Closer than sisters, Lara and Marija share everything, from stolen fruit and Hollywood movies as girls to ideologies and even lovers as young women. But when the Bosnian War pits their homelands against each other in a bloodbath, Lara and Marija are forced...
11) A serious man
Language
English
Description
One ordinary man's quest to become a serious man. Physics professor Larry Gopnik can't believe his life, His wife is leaving him for his best friend, his unemployed brother won't move off the couch, someone is threatening his career, his kids are a mystery and his neighbor is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family,...
12) Train to Trieste
Author
Language
English
Description
Her story begins in 1977, in a village at the foot of the Carpathian mountains in Ceausescus Romania. She is seventeen and madly in love with a mysterious, handsome boy called Mihai. When Monas friends and family begin to disappear, Mona begins to wonder about this man she has fallen for. One night, narrowly escaping the police, she flees to Chicago, where she struggles to move forward and not to look back, to bury the longing for the country and...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Short stories have to accomplish a nearly impossible magic trick: to introduce a world often much stranger than our own and make you care about it in a matter of pages," writes R. F. Kuang in her introduction. "The most important part of this magic trick is just a willingness to get weird." The stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 are brimming with bizarre and otherworldly premises. Women can't lie or fall in love. Fathers
...