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Mikhail Iossel w/ Matthew Zapruder – – Notes from Cyberground
February 26, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+0
Tuesday, February 26
7:00pm
EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS welcomes Mikhail Iossel to discuss his new new book Notes From Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling, on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm. He will be in conversation with Matthew Zapruder.
America under Donald Trump. Russia under Vladimir Putin. Many have ridiculed them. None have done so with such scathing wit as Mikhail Iossel. From a youth spent in the USSR to a life remade in the USA, Iossel shares the brunt of this experience on Facebook, where thousands follow his blistering posts on Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, and his lyrical, eerily timely reflections on life under totalitarianism. Notes from Cyberground brings together a choice selection of Iossel’s aphorisms, ranging from a few words to a few hundred words. Each chapter covers a month from Election Day 2016 to October 2018. Even when comical, this gem of a book is dead serious. It will bring solace to anyone who feels distressed by today’s surreal politics
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mikhail Iossel, the Leningrad-born author of the story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know (W. W. Norton) and coeditor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2010), is a professor of English/Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal and the founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international program. Back in the Soviet Union, he worked as an electromagnetic engineer/submarine demagnetizer and as roller-coaster security guard, and belonged to the organization of samizdat writers, Club-81. He came to the US in 1986, at the age of thirty, a whole and complete life behind him, and started writing in English in 1988. Among his awards are Guggenheim, NEA, and Stegner Fellowships. His stories and other prose, in English and in translation to several languages, have appeared in NewYorker.com, Guernica, Literarian, AGNI, North American Review, Threepenny Review, Interia, Boulevard, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.