Nine of Russia's Foremost Women Writers

Glas 30, 300 pages
ISBN 5-7172-0063-3

GLAS's third collection of top women writers, NINE includes some internationally known names as well as half a dozen other foremost women authors appearing here for the first time in English.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of free speech (and publishing), Russian women have become a force in the world of letters. Where in the past they were known chiefly as literary widows or devoted wives, occasionally as poets or critics, and only very rarely as novelists, today they are beginning to dominate publishing lists in fiction and non-fiction alike.

Svetlana ALEXIYEVICH, a Byelorussian dissident, constructs powerful narrative collages out of "live human voices" culled from her interviews with witnesses to and participants in the most shattering national events. "She follows life rather than trying to invent it and she does so with great talent and keen vision."
Alexieyevich's books have been translated into more than 20 languages around the world. The War's Unwomanly Face details the lives of Soviet women who fought in WWII (pilots, parachutists, snipers); The Last Witnesses looks at that war's children; Boys in Zinc addresses the problem of post-traumatic-stress syndrome in veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war; Enchanted by Death focuses on those driven to suicide by the collapse of the Soviet Union and their socialist illusions; The Chernobyl Prayer is a requiem for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Her Landscape of Loneliness shows how tragic social circumstances undermine people's ability to experience and enjoy love.

Maria ARBATOVA — a leading feminist famed for her frank writing. My Name is Woman takes place in an abortion clinic where the heroine reflects on her failed love affair and women's submissive role in love and life. An award-winning writer and dramatist as well as an outspoken feminist, she has been hailed as "Russia's Erica Jong". Arbatova's best-selling books include: My Name is Woman, A Visit from a Middle-aged Lady, Love Affairs by Cell Phone, and Reading Plays. Her latest book, Farewell to the 20th Century is an autobiographical novel summing up her rich experience as a woman and public figure.

Nina GORLANOVA sets Lake Joy in her native Siberian city of Perm — in the small, closed world of a maternity ward. As a new life is born their suburb is being flooded and they are moved to new homes to start a new life. By returning in her stories to one and the same place, Gorlanova creates a somewhat fantastic world populated with curious characters and possessing its own mythology. The life in her invented Perm is squalid but merry, risky but indestructible. Gorlanova's short novel Love in Rubber Gloves won first prize at the International Competition for Women's Prose. Her Learning a Lesson was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize (1996).

Anastasia GOSTEVA takes the reader on an unusual journey around India and America (Closed Americas). The heroine's attempt to run away from herself and her unrequited love is in fact a desperate effort to come to terms with who she really is.

Gosteva belongs to the first generation to come of age in post-Soviet Russia and to travel freely beyond it. Her Samurai's Daughter won the Znamya prize for The Best Literary Debut of 1997. Her other notable works include Travel Agnus Dei and The Den of the Enlightened.

Ludmila PETRUSHEVSKAYA's absurd middle-aged heroine (in Waterloo Bridge) finds she has fallen in love with a character in a movie. Seeing the film again and again, she experiences the romantic love she never had in real life. "Petrushevskaya's genius consists in her ability to seize on the disparate details of everyday life and render them as a single perfect whole, in which even the most unpalatable reality is made beautiful by the perfection of her art."
Petrushevskaya's rather eccentric writing — her black humor and "over-the-back-fence style" — is often described as critical realism mixed with postmodernism and elements of the absurd.

Petrushevskaya is the author of The Time: Night, short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize and translated into over 20 languages. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia's most prestigious prize The Triumph. The author of Immortal Love (also widely translated), On the Way to Eros, The Mystery of the House, Real-life Tales, and Find Me, Sleep, Petrushevskaya has been called "one of Russia's finest living writers".

Margarita SHARAPOVA draws on her unique personal experience as a circus animal tamer to describe the world of popular entertainment.

Her heroes are circus performers, gypsies, would-be writers, alcoholics and vagabonds. Driven by their emotions, a personal sense of duty and determination to preserve their inner freedom, they live their hand-to-mouth lives as best they can. Sharapova has won a number of prizes, including those of the Moscow Writers' Union and the International Democracy Foundation.

"Brilliantly crafted, inspired prose... unputdownable..."

Olga SLAVNIKOVA, a prolific young author from Yekaterinburg, depicts provincial life in a town where most of the men are involved in the illegal mining and cutting of precious stones. Krylov's Childhood combines memorable characters with ethnographic detail.

Slavnikova is the author of three widely acclaimed novels: A Dragon-fly the Size of a Dog, short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize (1997); Alone in the Mirror, short-listed for the Anti-Booker and winner of the Pavel Bazhov Prize; and Immortal, awarded the Critics' Academy Prize and short-listed for both the Belkin Prize and the National Bestseller Prize.

Natalia SMIRNOVA paints a disquieting picture of a provincial town in the Urals where two cultivated women must survive amidst working-class surroundings (The Women and the Shoemakers). "Her prose is deep and subtle but by no means female."

Smirnova has published two collections of short stories and a novel, Businesswoman. Her prose is subtle and slightly fanciful while her cultivated heroines are trapped in the crude surroundings of drab, provincial lives.

"The Women and the Shoemakers" won Smirnova a Fellowship from the Hawthornden International Writers' Retreat.

Ludmila ULITSKAYA's Diana and End of the Story look at women who lie with verve just to escape dreary reality. "Permeated with a tolerant humorous warmth, Ulitskaya's stories exemplify that strand in the humanist tradition that neither denounces nor deifies, but attempts to understand human psychology in its infinitely numerous manifestations."

"Ulitskaya's fresh, delicately sensual writing, full of the joys and pitfalls of every day, is a world away from the gloomy, fear-driven reflections on the plight of human beings under the Soviet heel." - The Observer.

Her fist novel Sonechka was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, translated into 20 languages and awarded France's Medici Prize for foreign fiction. Her novels The Funeral Party and Medea and her Children were also short-listed for the Russian Booker. Her novel The Kukotsky Case won the Russian Booker in 2002.