"Everything is always topsy-turvy here," he said.
A small town in the Ural mountains is the backdrop to the heartbreak and joys of a Russian-Jewish family, witnessing romance and illness, funerals and friendships, and the catastrophe of wartime invasion.
Amidst the snowy peaks of the Ararat valley, a married couple from Moscow admire the view from their hotel balcony, unprepared for the absurdist realities of tourism in the USSR.
From chandeliered metro stations to institute bus stops, monolithic skyscrapers and cockroach-infested apartments, Leonid Tsypkin evokes the tragicomedy of Soviet existence in transcendental prose.
Jamey Gambrell was a writer on Russian art and culture, and a translator. She was perhaps best known for translating Vladimir Sorokin's Ice Trilogy (published by New York Review Books), Day of the Oprichnik (FSG), and The Blizzard (FSG). Among her other translations are Tatyana Tolstaya's novel The Slynx and Letters: Summer 1926, a collection of letters between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke; both books were published by New York Review Books. She also translated Earthly Signs, another New York Review Books edition, which collects essays based on diaries kept during 1917-1922. Jamey Gambrell passed away on February 15, 2020.