This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism.
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This week, Cameron returns to the beginning of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian Trilogy with “Zvenihora.” The film, released in 1928, explores a thousand years of Ukrainian history — spanning from Varangian invasion to the rise of the Soviet Union.
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This week, Cameron dives into Vasily Grossman's first book of World War II: The People Immortal. Learn about how his writing evolved before writing his own "immortal" books, Stalingrad and LIfe and Fate
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Every author starts somewhere. To talk about Chekhov’s earliest published stories, Cameron sits down with Elena Michajlowska and Rosamund Bartlett, editors of a new collection.
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A short review of Sayat Nova (1969) / The Color of Pomegranates, directed by Sergei Parajanov. Plus, five other films I really liked this year.
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This week, Cameron dives into Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic and Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger, trying to probe the question plaguing recent episodes: “What is the value of art during wartime?”
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Cameron continues speaking about Yevgenia Belorusets’ work with War Diary and also explores the experience of women living through war in Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of Doves.
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This week, Cameron talks about unreliable narrators in Yevgenia Belorusets’ Lucky Breaks and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, posing an unusual argument: what if lying to your reader was a good thing?
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This week, in For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič’s Alindarka’s Children and Laguna-Pueblo-American writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Both novels explore people native to a land that is now, in different ways, hostile to them.
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This week, Cameron dives into William T. Vollmann's prose in Europe Central and into complicated memories in Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood.
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Cameron dives solo into two books: Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me by Teffi and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien.
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This week, Cameron sits down with the translators of Marina Tsvetaeva's The Story of Sonechka to discuss her recollections of an old relationships.
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