RaveThe New York Review of BooksThe translucent surface of her writing gives sight of the depths of the human spirit: its raging and yearning, its dark nights and joyous awakenings, its wild cries, its anarchic craziness ... Questions ripple...concerning what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories. Are these tales of witches, werewolves, demons, spirits, shape-shifters, and saving miracles really stories of the supernatural and the sacred? The short story, a genre Teffi mastered to perfection, is the ideal form for preserving enigmas in all their strangeness ... Teffi’s stories recreate this world of games, dreams, and madness, with its cast of nannies, servants, local peasants, house spirits, bathhouse devils, shape-shifters, and vampires ... Teffi’s stories often turn on juxtapositions of illusion and reality, moments when the intensity of the inner life bursts out.
Teffi, Trans. by Elizabeth Chandler
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksQuestions ripple through...all concerning what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories. Are these tales of witches, werewolves, demons, spirits, shape-shifters, and saving miracles really stories of the supernatural and the sacred? The short story, a genre Teffi mastered to perfection, is the ideal form for preserving enigmas in all their strangeness.
Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... [a] remarkable English translation ... a singular opportunity to become familiar with a major Russian poet and thinker ... Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Sebald.
Vasily Grossman, Trans. by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... fascinating ... takes us into the heart of the enigma of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany ... Grossman’s most humane writing about injustice and atrocity paradoxically emerges from his own didactic Socialist Realist style. His desire to connect individual lives with the great flow of history transformed itself into an ability to speak for individuals lost and destroyed in the flow.
