Download or read book Oksana Behave written by Maria Kuznetsova and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[The] Ukrainian American heroine of this sweet-bitter debut is a wisecracking fatalist who can be counted on to say the inappropriate thing, a tendency that becomes more pronounced as doomed crushes and family crises pile up on the road to adulthood.”—O: The Oprah Magazine When Oksana and her family move from the Ukraine to Florida to begin a new American life, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her cranky mother sits at home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets from men. All Oksana wants is to be as far away from her family as possible, to have friends, and to be normal—and though she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting in trouble. As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school-bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted key to New York City’s Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. After her grandmother moves back to Ukraine, Oksana longs for the motherland that looms large in her imagination but is a country she never really knew. When she visits her grandmother in Yalta and learns about her romantic past, Oksana comes to a new understanding of how to live without causing harm to the people she loves. But will Oksana ever quite learn to behave? Praise for Oksana, Behave! “Tragicomic and bittersweet . . . an immigrant's coming-of-age tale done with brio.”—Kirkus Reviews “What luck for readers that Oksana can’t behave! Little devil, infinite imbecile, poor futureless child—all the names her displaced, loving family give to her as she crashes and burns and wanders the wilderness of her inheritance, fit perfectly. As outrageous as she is, as funny and as awful as she can be, though, in Oksana, Maria Kuznetsova has also created a character of great passion and depth—of tragedy, even, too—the very sort that populate the stories of Chekhov and Tolstoy, the poems of Anna Akhmatova, and all the other Russian writers Oksana looks to for comfort and company and some sort of bearing in this absurd world. This novel is a stark, hilarious delight.”—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers

Download or read book Oksana Behave written by Maria Kuznetsova and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "irresistible" (Anthony Marra) debut about a Russian American girl's bumpy path to adulthood "The voice is so, so sharp and so funny that I am just like tickled--tickled --to be reading it."--Emma Straub, The Wall Street Journal When Oksana's family begins their new American life in Florida after emigrating from Ukraine, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her depressed mother sits home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets when she walks Oksana to school, not realizing that the street they're walking down is known as Prostitute Street. Oksana just wants to have friends and lead a normal life--and though she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting herself in trouble. As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted (and expensive-to-replace) key to New York City's Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. As her grandmother moves back to Ukraine, her father gets a job at Goldman Sachs, and her mother knits endless scarves, Oksana longs for a Russia that looms large in her imagination but is a country she never really knew. When she visits her grandmother in Yalta and learns about Baba's wartime past and her lost loves, Oksana begins to see just how much alike they are, and comes to a new understanding of how to embrace life and love without causing harm to the people dearest to her. But will Oksana ever quite learn to behave? Praise for Oksana, Behave "Tragicomic and bittersweet . . . an immigrant's coming-of-age tale done with brio."--Kirkus Reviews "What luck for readers that Oksana can't behave Little devil, infinite imbecile, poor futureless child--all the names her displaced, loving family give to her as she crashes and burns and wanders the wilderness of her inheritance, fit perfectly. As outrageous as she is, as funny and as awful as she can be, though, in Oksana, Maria Kuznetsova has also created a character of great passion and depth--of tragedy, even, too--the very sort that populate the stories of Chekhov and Tolstoy, the poems of Anna Akhmatova, and all the other Russian writers Oksana looks to for comfort and company and some sort of bearing in this absurd world. This novel is a stark, hilarious delight."--Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

Download or read book Something Unbelievable written by Maria Kuznetsova and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overwhelmed new mom discovers unexpected parallels between life in twenty-first-century America and her grandmother’s account of their family’s escape from the Nazis in this sharp, heartfelt novel. “A fresh perspective—one that’s both haunting and hilarious—on dual-timeline war stories, a feat that only a writer of Kuznetsova’s caliber could pull off.”—Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue Larissa is a stubborn, brutally honest woman in her eighties, tired of her home in Kiev, Ukraine—tired of everything really, except for her beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Natasha is tired as well, but that’s because she just had a baby, and she’s struggling to balance her roles as a new mother, a wife, a struggling actress, and a host to her husband’s slacker best friend, Stas, who has been staying with them in their cramped one-bedroom apartment in upper Manhattan. When Natasha asks Larissa to tell the story of her family’s Soviet wartime escape from the Nazis in Kiev, she reluctantly agrees. Maybe Natasha is just looking for distraction from her own life, but Larissa is desperate to make her happy, even though telling the story makes her heart ache. Larissa recounts the nearly three-year period when she fled with her self-absorbed sister, parents, and grandmother to a factory town in the Ural Mountains where they faced starvation, a cholera outbreak, a tragic suicide, and where she was torn in her affections for two brothers from a wealthy family. But neither Larissa nor Natasha can anticipate how loudly these lessons of the past will echo in their present moments. Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass on to the younger generations, willingly or not.

Download or read book Lights All Night Long written by Lydia Fitzpatrick and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and deftly plotted narrative of family and belonging, Lights All Night Long is a dazzling debut novel from an acclaimed young writer "Lights All Night Long is utterly brilliant and completely captivating. . . . One of the most propulsive, un-put-downable literary novels I've read in ages."--Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. But all is not right in Ilya's world: he's consumed by the fate of his older brother Vladimir, the magnetic rebel to Ilya's dutiful wunderkind, back in their tiny Russian hometown. The two have always been close, spending their days dreaming of escaping to America. But when Ilya was tapped for the exchange, Vladimir disappeared into their town's seedy, drug-plagued underworld. Just before Ilya left, the murders of three young women rocked the town's usual calm, and Vladimir found himself in prison. With the help of Sadie, who has secrets of her own, Ilya embarks on a mission to prove Vladimir's innocence. Piecing together the timeline of the murders and Vladimir's descent into addiction, Ilya discovers the radical lengths to which Vladimir has gone to protect him--a truth he could only have learned by leaving him behind. A rich tale of belonging and the pull of homes both native and adopted, Lights All Night Long is a spellbinding story of the fierce bond between brothers determined to find a way back to each other.

Download or read book Novel with Cocaine written by M. Ageyev and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dostoevskian psychological novel of ideas, Novel with Cocaine explores the interaction between psychology, philosophy, and ideology in its frank portrayal of an adolescent's cocaine addiction. The story relates the formative experiences of Vadim at school and with women before he turns to drug abuse and the philosophical reflections to which it gives rise. Although Ageyev makes little explicit reference to the Revolution, the novel's obsession with addictive forms of thinking finds resonance in the historical background, in which "our inborn feelings of humanity and justice" provoke "the cruelties and satanic transgressions committed in its name.

Download or read book The Last Romantics written by Tara Conklin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times–bestselling author of The House Girl comes a novel about our most precious and dangerous attachment: family In the spring of 1981, the young Skinner siblings—fierce Renee, dreamy Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona—lose their father to a heart attack and their mother to a paralyzing depression, events that thrust them into a period they will later call “the Pause.” Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the siblings navigate the dangers and resentments of the Pause to emerge fiercely loyal and deeply connected. Two decades later, the Skinners find themselves again confronted with a family crisis that tests the strength of these bonds and forces them to question the life choices they’ve made and what, exactly, they will do for love. Narrated nearly a century later by the youngest sibling, the renowned poet Fiona Skinner, The Last Romantics spans a lifetime. It’s a story of sex and affection, sacrifice and selfishness, deeply held principles and dashed expectations, a lost engagement ring, a squandered baseball scholarship, unsupervised summers at the neighbourhood pond and an iconic book of love poems. But most of all it is the story of Renee, Caroline, Joe and Fiona: the ways they support each other, the ways they betray each other and the ways they knit back together bonds they have fractured. In the vein of Commonwealth, Little Fires Everywhere and The Nest, this is a panoramic, tenderly insightful novel about one devoted, imperfect family. The Last Romantics is an unforgettable exploration of the responsibilities we bear both gracefully and unwillingly, and the all-important, ever-complex definition of love.

Download or read book American Gypsy written by Oksana Marafioti and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the author's early experiences as a fifteen-year-old Gypsy emigrating with her family from the Soviet Union to the United States.

Download or read book Ordinary Hazards written by Anna Bruno and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of Celeste Ng and Mary Beth Keane comes an impeccably paced and transfixing debut novel that “vividly renders the messiness of a single human life in all its joy and heartbreak” (Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author). It’s 5 p.m. on a Wednesday when Emma settles into her hometown bar with a motley crew of locals, all unaware that a series of decisions over the course of a single night is about to change their lives forever. As the evening unfolds, key details about Emma’s history emerge, and the past comes bearing down on her like a freight train. Why has Emma, a powerhouse in the business world, ended up here? What is she running away from? And what is she willing to give up to recapture the love she once cherished? A “crisp, haunting, and intelligent” (Stephen Markley, author of Ohio) exploration of modern love, guilt, and the place we call home, Ordinary Hazards follows one woman’s epic journey back to a life worth living.

Download or read book I Will Die in a Foreign Land written by Kalani Pickhart and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award, Winner. * A BookBrowse "20 Best Books of 2022" * VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Longlist. * An ABA "Indie Next List" pick for November 2021. * "A Best Book of 2021" —New York Public Library, Cosmopolitan, Independent Book Review * "October 2021 Must-Reads" —Debutiful, The Chicago Review of Books, The Millions In 1913, a Russian ballet incited a riot in Paris at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. “Only a Russian could do that," says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.” A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians. I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is an Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, who climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano. As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history. While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy. "Kalani Pickhart's timely debut novel, I Will Die In a Foreign Land, is about the 2014 Ukrainian revolution which provided a pretense for Russia to annex Crimea. The story follows the experiences of several characters whose lives intersect as the country's political situation deteriorates. There's a Ukrainian-American doctor, an old KGB spy, a former mine worker, and others, and these episodes are interspersed with folk songs, news reports and historical notes. The effect—kaleidoscopic but never confusing—provides an intimate sense of a country convulsing, mourning, and somehow surviving." —CBS News, "The Book Report: Recommendations from Washington Post critic Ron Charles" (Watch the full video on CBS News, February 6, 2022).

Download or read book Tear It Down written by Nick Petrie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the new edge-of-your-seat adventure from national bestselling author Nick Petrie, Peter Ash pursues one case--and stumbles into another--in the City of the Blues. Iraq war veteran Peter Ash is restless in the home he shares with June Cassidy in Washington State. June knows Peter needs to be on the move, so she sends him to Memphis to help her friend Wanda Wyatt, a photographer and war correspondent who's been receiving peculiar threats. When Peter arrives in Memphis, however, he finds the situation has gone downhill fast--someone has just driven a dump truck into Wanda's living room. But neither Wanda nor Peter can figure out why. At the same time, a young homeless street musician finds himself roped into a plan to rob a jewelry store. The heist doesn't go as planned, and the young man finds himself holding a sack full of Rolexes and running for his life. When his getaway car breaks down, he steals a new one at gunpoint--Peter's 1968 green Chevrolet pickup truck. Peter likes the skinny kid's smarts and attitude, but he soon discovers that the desperate musician is in far worse trouble than he knows. And Wanda's troubles are only beginning. Peter finds himself stuck between Memphis gangsters--looking for Rolexes and revenge--and a Mississippi ex-con and his hog-butcher brother looking for a valuable piece of family history that goes all the way back to the Civil War.

Download or read book Run Me to Earth written by Paul Yoon and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author Paul Yoon comes a beautiful, aching novel about three kids orphaned in 1960s Laos—and how their destinies are entwined across decades, anointed by Hernan Diaz as “one of those rare novels that stays with us to become a standard with which we measure other books.” Alisak, Prany, and Noi—three orphans united by devastating loss—must do what is necessary to survive the perilous landscape of 1960s Laos. When they take shelter in a bombed out field hospital, they meet Vang, a doctor dedicated to helping the wounded at all costs. Soon the teens are serving as motorcycle couriers, delicately navigating their bikes across the fields filled with unexploded bombs, beneath the indiscriminate barrage from the sky. In a world where the landscape and the roads have turned into an ocean of bombs, we follow their grueling days of rescuing civilians and searching for medical supplies, until Vang secures their evacuation on the last helicopters leaving the country. It’s a move with irrevocable consequences—and sets them on disparate and treacherous paths across the world. Spanning decades and magically weaving together storylines laced with beauty and cruelty, Paul Yoon crafts a gorgeous story that is a breathtaking historical feat and a fierce study of the powers of hope, perseverance, and grace.

Download or read book The Golden House written by Salman Rushdie and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A modern American epic set against the panorama of contemporary politics and culture—a hurtling, page-turning mystery that is equal parts The Great Gatsby and The Bonfire of the Vanities ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, PBS, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Financial Times, The Times of India On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, an enigmatic billionaire from foreign shores takes up residence in the architectural jewel of “the Gardens,” a cloistered community in New York’s Greenwich Village. The neighborhood is a bubble within a bubble, and the residents are immediately intrigued by the eccentric newcomer and his family. Along with his improbable name, untraceable accent, and unmistakable whiff of danger, Nero Golden has brought along his three adult sons: agoraphobic, alcoholic Petya, a brilliant recluse with a tortured mind; Apu, the flamboyant artist, sexually and spiritually omnivorous, famous on twenty blocks; and D, at twenty-two the baby of the family, harboring an explosive secret even from himself. There is no mother, no wife; at least not until Vasilisa, a sleek Russian expat, snags the septuagenarian Nero, becoming the queen to his king—a queen in want of an heir. Our guide to the Goldens’ world is their neighbor René, an ambitious young filmmaker. Researching a movie about the Goldens, he ingratiates himself into their household. Seduced by their mystique, he is inevitably implicated in their quarrels, their infidelities, and, indeed, their crimes. Meanwhile, like a bad joke, a certain comic-book villain embarks upon a crass presidential run that turns New York upside-down. Set against the strange and exuberant backdrop of current American culture and politics, The Golden House also marks Salman Rushdie’s triumphant and exciting return to realism. The result is a modern epic of love and terrorism, loss and reinvention—a powerful, timely story told with the daring and panache that make Salman Rushdie a force of light in our dark new age.

Download or read book Love Like Water Love Like Fire written by Mikhail Iossel and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience “We can’t stop turning the pages of this book.” —Ilya Kaminsky, New York Times Book Review From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons. Unsparing and poignant, Mikhail Iossel’s twenty stories of Soviet childhood and adulthood, dissidence and subsequent immigration, are filled with wit and humor even as they describe the daily absurdities of a fickle and often perilous reality.

Download or read book After Birth written by Elisa Albert and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A widely acclaimed young writer's fierce new novel, in which childbirth and new motherhood are as high-stakes a crucible as any combat zone.

Download or read book We Are Jews Again written by Yuli Kosharovsky and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kosharovsky’s authoritative four-volume history of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union is now available in a condensed and edited volume that makes this compelling insider’s account of Soviet Jewish activism after Stalin available to a wider audience. Originally published in Russian from 2008 to 2012, “We Are Jews Again” chronicles the struggles of Jews who wanted nothing more than the freedom to learn Hebrew, the ability to provide a Jewish education for their children, and the right to immigrate to Israel. Through dozens of interviews with former refuseniks and famous activists, Kosharovsky provides a vivid and intimate view of the Jewish movement and a detailed account of the persecution many faced from Soviet authorities.

Download or read book The History of Animals A Philosophy written by Oxana Timofeeva and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxana Timofeeva's The History of Animals: A Philosophy is an original and ambitious treatment of the "animal question". While philosophers have always made distinctions between human beings and animals, Timofeeva imagines a world free of such walls and borders. Timofeeva shows the way towards the full acceptance of our animality; an acceptance which does not mean the return to our animal roots, or anything similar. The freedom generated by this acceptance operates through negativity; is an effect of the rejection of the very core of metaphysical philosophy and Christian culture, traditionally opposed to our 'animal' nature and seemingly detached from it. With a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, this book is accessible, jargon-free and ideal for students and all those interested in re-imagining how we engage with animals and the environment.

Download or read book Savage Feast written by Boris Fishman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told recipe-filled memoir. A story of family, immigration, and love—and an epic meal—Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle. A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected. Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate. Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love.