A Long, Epic Latin American Shadow

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Nostalgia for Something Unnamed

Readers familiar with André Aciman’s work may be forgiven for assuming that the writer, a teacher of Proust, after all, is a nostalgic and sentimental man, and that his books, from the 1995 memoir Out of Egypt to the new novel Harvard Square, are an attempt to recapture and recast cherished moments from a well enjoyed life. For the Egyptian-born Aciman, though, it is more complicated than that.

“It’s easy to say I’m nostalgic for Egypt or nostalgic for my childhood, but I didn’t like Egypt, and I didn’t like my childhood,” Aciman says, laughing ...

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A Russian Writer’s Hard-Won Happy Ending

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has something to say about happy endings. The 74-year-old Russian storyteller, who begged in the streets as a child, who once lived under a desk with her mother, who grew up to have a husband who became paralyzed and died in his early 30s, whose young son was sent away due to illness, and who was charged with a felony for criticizing Mikhail Gorbachev, is clearly not predisposed to crafting tales that swell and swoon toward a “happily ever after.” Yet with her new collection of short fiction, There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s ...

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Complete Interview with Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is a revered writer in Russia and becoming better-known by American readers. Because she doesn’t speak English and is thus not interviewed very frequently by American journalists, we provide here the text of her responses to Kirkus writer David Garza’s questions (to read Garza's article about Petrushevskaya, click here). Thanks to Petrushevskaya’s translator Anna Summers for her work translating Petrushevskaya’s responses.

What compelled you to continue writing during the years when your works went unpublished? Did you belong to any community that read and supported your work during those years? The introduction to ...

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