Found Life

Found Life will richly reward readers interested in short-form fiction and in the shifting landscape of contemporary Russian literature more generally, not to mention daily life in today's Russia. -- James H. McGavran III * Translation and Literature * By turns entertaining, quixotic and unnerving, this sampling of the prolific writer's many voices and styles is something you will want to leave lying around to dip into when you have a spare moment, or just before nodding off to bed, to seed your dreamscape. * Russian Life * The most engaging pieces, despite their brevity, require concentration, but whatever your attention span, you'll be rewarded by miniatures such as this: 'The signature taste of a gun barrel.' -- Anna Aslanyan * Times Literary Supplement * A welcome collection from a writer worth hearing more from-so translators get busy. * Kirkus Reviews * Linor Goralik is a Renaissance woman of our own day, writing (and drawing!) in a wide range of genres, all with sharp intelligence. Her writing is fresh and thought-provoking, with both profound insight and deadpan humor. The numerous translators allow exploration of different aspects of Goralik's voice, so that this selection of work offers the reader a wonderful variety and versatility. A beautiful and important book! -- Sibelan Forrester, Swarthmore College Linor Goralik has a perfect ear for the wander and wonder of ordinary speech, for the way the weirdness of human language conveys the weirdness of human experience. In turn hilarious and heart-rending, her fictions and poems bristle with epiphanies, with jolts of comprehension and, just as commonly, of vertiginous incomprehension. A literary descendant of Daniil Kharms, the conceptualists, and Chekhov, this transnational writer-ventriloquist describes a world of multiple realities, including that of the supernatural, but she is also painstakingly precise in her depictions of male and female behavior in post-Soviet space. The editors and translators are to be praised for, among many other things, finding the idiomatic and colloquial American English to convincingly express the alive Russian of the original. -- Eugene Ostashevsky, author of <i>The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi</i> Goralik remains a key figure in post-Soviet literature and culture due to her omnivorous referentiality and intertextuality, her deployment of detail, her absurdist, jarring wit, and her ability to construct tiny, perfect vignettes out of everyday scraps of language . . . Found Life is a strong introduction to a writer representing an important thread of contemporary Russophone literature and culture. -- Anne O. Fisher * The Russian Review *

Linor Goralik (1975-) is an award-winning contemporary Russian writer of flash fiction, poetry, essays, fairy tales, theater, and more. Her boundary-pushing works include fourteen books and dozens of other print and electronic publications. Ainsley Morse is the cotranslator (with Bela Shayevich) of I Live I See: The Collected Poems of Vsevolod Nekrasov and Kholin 66, as well as Anatomical Theater by Andrei Sen-Senkov (with Peter Golub). Maria Vassileva is a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. Maya Vinokour is a faculty fellow in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.

Introduction Part I: Poetry Part II: Comics Part III: Theater Part IV: Short Prose Excerpts from Biblical Zoo Found Life In Short: Ninety-One Rather Short Stories Something Like That (A War Story) The Blind Eye Part V: Longer Prose Agatha Goes Home Valerii: A Short Novel Part VI: "Everyone Reads the Text That's in Their Own Head"