This week, Cameron dives solo into two books: Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me by Teffi and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. He’ll pull apart their authors’ mutual love for taking a creative license to their own lives.
Major themes: Emotional truth, social expectations, Vietnam
Jake Zawlacki joins the podcast to talk about his translation of Akhmet Baitursynov's 1911 poetry collection Mosquito, a political tract that contains his hopes and fears for the Kazakh people and a yet-to-exist state.
A novel about the Great Terror written during the Great Terror, Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna lives a fairly comfortable Soviet life – until her son is arrested for an unspecified crime.
Cameron dives into John Williams' 1960 novel, Butcher's Crossing, a cautionary tale about how reading Ralph Waldo Emerson can drive you into buffalo-murdering madness.
