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Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. She also founded the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engages with the cultural, social, and political reality of contemporary Russia. More about this author >
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox. Deformations was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem "Joy" won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker, a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and winner of the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award. More about this author >
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Translated from the Russian
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
