When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.

    Bogdanov was a strong proponent of the arts, co-founding the Proletarian Culture (Proletkult) organization to provide political and artistic education to workers.

    . . an exquisite, explosive debut."--Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing EarthComing of age in the USSR in the 1980s, best friends Anya and Milka try to envision a free and joyful future for themselves. They spend their summers at Anya's dacha just outside of Moscow, lazing in the apple orchard, listening to Queen songs, and fantasizing about trips abroad and the lives of American teenagers. Meanwhile, Anya's parents talk about World War II, the Blockade, and the hardships they have endured.By the time Anya and Milka are fifteen, the Soviet Empire is on the verge of collapse. They pair up with classmates Trifonov and Lopatin, and the four friends share secrets and desires, argue about history and politics, and discuss forbidden books. But the world is changing, and the fleeting time they have together is cut short by a sudden tragedy.Years later, Anya returns to Russia from America, where she has chosen a different kind of life, far from her family and childhood friends. When she meets Lopatin again, he is a smug businessman who wants to buy her parents' dacha and cut down the apple orchard. Haunted by the ghosts of her youth, Anya comes to the stark realization that memory does not fade or disappear; rather, it moves us across time, connecting our past to our future, joys to sorrows.Inspired by Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry's The Orchard powerfully captures the lives of four Soviet teenagers who are about to lose their country and one another, and who struggle to survive, to save their friendship, to recover all that has been lost.

    fascinating and true' Grayson PerryThis funny and personal memoir is the account of an audacious attempt by James Birch, a young British curator, to mount the ground-breaking retrospective of Francis Bacon's work at the newly refurbished Central House of Artists, Moscow in 1988.Side-lined by the British establishment, Birch found himself at the heart of a honey-trap and the focus for a picaresque cast of Soviet officials, attach�s and politicians under the forbidding eye of the KGB as he attempted to bring an unseen western cultural icon to Russia during the time of 'Glasnost', just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.Bacon in Moscow is the story of the evolution of an exhibition that was at the artistic and political heart of a sea of change that culminated with the fall of the USSR.'A rollicking cultural adventure before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the meteoric rise of contemporary art in the nineties' Grayson Perry

    

    Ekaterina Simonova details a grandmother’s end-of-life visions; her final days are spent convening with her dead loved ones, whispering and laughing, happy to be reunited. In insatiable verse, Galina Rymbu assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” And Alla Gorbunova surveys a changing city from her self-described “cloud tower,” recalling where buildings used to stand, and through this double vision of past and present she unspools the small but extraordinary details that might otherwise be lost to time.With this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico Series, it’s clear that Russian poetry is in the midst of a new golden era. In language that shimmers with life, this new generation of poets demonstrates a refusal to accept the structural or moralizing conventions of the past. Instead, they ask us to give ourselves over to poetry as we would a memory, letting it wash over us.

    Only thirty minutes until doom. Can the government save us? What can you do to protect yourself, your family, and your friends? What will tomorrow look like?This political thriller follows several sets of characters after receiving an emergency alert telling them nuclear bombs are approaching the United States. Impact is only thirty minutes away.