What do you expect when your raw material is a dog?
Continue reading...A Hero of Someone Else’s Time (Russia’s Alien Nations)
Eliot BorensteinAn alien visiting Russia, whether that alien is from America or Mars, is going to require a huge amount of information to get up to speed
Continue reading...Teaching The Master and Margarita: A Pedagogical Field Note
Masha KiselIf I had to choose a book to bring on a desert island, I wouldn’t choose this one.
Continue reading...Will Somebody Please Write This Novel?
Eliot BorensteinThe dependably inventive G. Willow Wilson has just come out with a novel called Alif the Unseen, which somehow combines gray hat Arab hackers, would-be Islamic terrorists, and troublemaking djinns into a narrative that never feels overstuffed. Alif takes place in an unnamed City somewhere in the Middle East, and Wilson (a longtime resident of Cairo whose initial claim to fame was her memoir about her conversion to Islam) juggles politics and magical realism with remarkable flair. So what does this have to do with Russia?
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