Maidenhair

"One of the most prominent names in modern Russian literature." —Publishers Weekly Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter—the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise—and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter’s own reading: a his­tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son “Nebuchadnezzasaurus,” ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. It bravely takes on the eternal questions—of truth and fiction, of time and timeless­ness, of love and war, of Death and the Word—and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys. Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz • About the Author: Mikhail Shishkin has worked as a school teacher and a journalist. In 1995, he moved to Switzerland, where he worked as a Russian and German translator for asylum seekers. His novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. In addition to winning Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (2005), he has won the Russian Booker Prize (2000); following its publication in Russia in 2005,Maidenhair was awarded both the National Bestseller Prize and the Big Book prize, and in 2011 it was awarded the Preis des Hauses der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. His latest novel, Letter-Book, won the Russian Big Book prize in 2011. Shishkin splits his time between Moscow and Zurich. About the Translator: Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian. The winner of a Translation Fellowship from the NEA (1998 and 2006) and the Heldt Translation Prize (2002 and 2011), Schwartz has translated classic literary works by Nina Berberova, Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Gelasimov, among others, including Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. • "Most of the critics agree that 2005 will go down in the history of Russian literature as the year when Maidenhair, the new novel by Mikhail Shishkin, was published." —Literaturnaya Rossia "Maidenhair is a kind of book they give the Nobel prize for. The novel is majestic." —Nezavisimaya Gazeta