June 5, 2023
ASP is pleased to present an interview with Kati Parppei and Bulat Rakhimzianov, who edited the new book Images of Otherness in Russia, 1547-1917.
May 22, 2023
ASP is pleased to present an interview with Alexander Rojavin, translator of Alexander Genis’s Dovlatov and Surroundings: A Philological Novel and Fazil Iskander’s Man and His Surroundings, for #ReadTheWorld, an online bookfair celebrating translation organized by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
May 12, 2023
ASP is pleased to present an interview with Michael Hurwicz, author of Leonid Hurwicz: Intelligent Designer, a “fascinating, exciting story” about Leonid “Leo” Hurwicz, Nobel Prize-winning economist.
January 18, 2023
ASP is pleased to present an interview with Professor Andrii Portnov, author of the the newly released “pathbreaking study” on the history of one of Ukraine’s most fascinating cities, Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City.
December 9, 2021
“[I]s it a biography? an adventure story? a historical novel about the period in Russian history at a pivotal moment – its first attempted and abortive revolution, the Decembrist uprising of 1825? Or is after all the mainspring of the novel Russian literature played out by characters conjured up by the author’s imagination? Characters familiar by name to every Russian schoolchild (Pushkin, Krylov, Zhukovsky) leap off the page as live people, fascinating, memorable. And of course, the protagonist of the novel, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, hardly known to Tynianov’s contemporaries, a long-forgotten poet and Pushkin’s lycée friend, is in particular, Tynianov’s tour de force.”
June 30, 2021
“I suspect that there is something in every country’s history that some of its residents would rather forget. For reasons that remain unclear Ivan the Terrible made war on his own people. Unfortunately Ivan’s reign was so important in Russian history in both domestic and foreign affairs that it is impossible to avoid. To further complicate matters the surviving sources on his reign are often contested, either because they are biased (which applies to native as well as foreigner accounts) or are extant only in seventeenth-century manuscripts which compromises their authenticity and accuracy. There are major gaps in the types of evidence that have survived; for example, we have no personal rather than public documents from Ivan. Therefore there is a wide space for legitimate scholarly disagreement. But Ivan’s controversial identity goes well beyond these academic considerations.”
March 24, 2021
This Q&A between Maxim D. Shrayer, editor of the “Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy” series, and Cynthia L. Haven, author of the latest book in the series, The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline, was originally published on 3 Quarks Daily.
January 13, 2021
The Ghost of Shakespeare: Collected Essays by poet Anna Frajlich, edited by Ronald Meyer, is out now. Meyer, Frajlich’s Columbia University colleague, conducted an interview with the author over the New Year holidays. Their discussion on the book, the significance of its title, the origins of the essays in the volume, and more follows below.
December 30, 2020
Curious about how When Rabbis Bless Congress: The Great American Story of Jewish Prayers on Capitol Hill came to be? Author Howard Mortman provides some insights and fascinating anecdotes about researching and writing his book in a series of commonly-asked questions and answers.
November 11, 2020
The works of Debora Vogel (1900-1942), eminent Polish-Jewish writer, poet, and critic writing in Yiddish in the twentieth century, have been collected and translated by Anastasiya Lyubas in the new volume Blooming Spaces: The Collected Poetry, Prose, Critical Writing, and Letters of Debora Vogel. Here, Dr. Lyubas tells us more about the book, Debora Vogel, and how this project came to her.
