Get a Sneak Peek of “The City of Shadows”! Plus this week’s selection of giveaways

Happy Solstice, everyone! In celebration of this most balanced and auspicious day, I thought I’d share a sneak peek of “The City of Shadows,” book 3 in the Giaco & Luca series. Between returning to teaching after my medical leave, and working on stuff related to my other pen name, I’ve been much slower than […]

#TranslationThursday: “The Dead Wander in the Desert” by Rollan Seisenbayev

In “The Dead Wander in the Desert,” we see the final, painful days of the Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the final, painful days of the Aral Sea, as a once-bountiful land dries up and turns to a poisonous, salt-filled desert. The characters in the book fight to preserve the sea, but in vain: the central […]

“Bloody Creek Murder” by Susan Clayton-Goldner #Mystery #BookReview #NewRelease

Bloody Creek Murder I’ve been following along the Winston Radhauser series since the beginning, and have been enjoying it more and more. In this, its sixth installment, the author does a particularly excellent job of combining mystery with family drama. The mixture both brings out the pathos of the interpersonal situation the characters find themselves […]

“Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral” by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev

Fasten your seatbelts, Russianists: it’s about to get weird. Well, maybe no weirder than usual for literature of this period. Russian literature of the early 20th century was gloriously, insanely bizarre. Writers were flying their freak flag high, and reveling in it. “Beyond Tula” is a case in point. Although in fact, it’s no weirder […]

“The Daemoniac” by Kat Ross

“The Daemoniac” is a venture into a new genre by epic fantasy author Kat Ross. It is, as it says in the subtitle, a Gaslamp Gothic story, meaning set in the late Victorian era. 1888, to be precise, shortly after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published “A Study in Scarlet,” and shortly before Jack the Ripper’s […]

“Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories” by Maxim Osipov

In “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” we meet a new Russia: one that stands with one foot in the recent Soviet past, one foot in the more distant past of Pushkin and Lermontov, and, well, a third foot in the Millennial post-Soviet present. And maybe a fourth foot in the West. Like Chekhov (and Bulgakov), Maxim Osipov […]

“Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata #JapaneseLiterature #LiteraryFiction #Audiobook #LiteratureinTranslation

Convenience Store Woman I stumbled upon “Convenience Store Woman” while perusing audiobook deals. Since I’m always interested in finding new Asian authors to read/listen to, I snapped it up. And boy, am I glad I did so. “Convenience Store Woman” tells the story of Keiko Furukura, a woman who’s never managed to fit into society. […]

“The Budapest Artists’ Club” by Claire Doyle #BookReview #LiteraryFiction #Hungary #Budapest

The Budapest Artists’ Club “The Budapest Artists’ Club” takes place over two separate trips to Budapest, one on the brink of the new millennium, one almost twenty years later. In her first trip to Budapest, Laura loses her boyfriend but gains musical skills, and is caught up in a plot to switch out a viola […]

“The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus I’d heard about “The Night Circus” for a while before I finally got around to reading it. And when I first started it, I wasn’t sure if I actually liked it or not. But by the end, not only had I warmed to it, I was enthralled by it. It’s a strange, […]

“The Ashes of Aubrey Milner” by Ellison Blackburn

The Ashes of Aubrey Milner: The Chicago St. Clairs Ellison Blackburn “The Ashes of Aubrey Milner” is a detective story with a difference: the detective in question is a woman who has been brought from the future back into Victorian-era Chicago, and is now working as a police medical examiner, disguised as a man. When […]