Tom Bissell’s new collection of short stories, God Lives in St Petersburg, is getting some rave reviews from my fellow blog authors Nathan and Lyndon.
Lyndon says:
This is a book that you have to read if you’ve spent any amount of time in the post-Soviet region in the past 15 years, and the writing is so good that it may be equally appreciated by people who have never left the North American land mass.
Nathan says:
Tom Bissell’s a truly gifted writer, and these stories, much like Chasing the Sea, are almost musical in their ability to evoke an emotional response.
Well, they’ve sold it to me. I really enjoyed Chasing the Sea, so right after work I’m going to be heading over to Amazon to get me a copy.
BUT, as an aside, I just have to say that I fully agree with Lyndon when he moans about book covers which use cyrillic characters in place of real ones. The backwards R is the most frequent offender, and it drives me nuts! Nothing screams out louder to me that the book is sensationalist crap written by someone who knows nothing about Russia, than that bloody backwards R. I swear that, if I ever am so foolish as to publish a book even vaguely related to Russia, I will have it written into my contract that nothing of the sort will grace my book’s cover.
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{ 5 comments }
Aussiegirl 03.02.05 at 10:35 pm
The backwards “R” drives me nuts too. Thanks for the tip - looks like an interesting book to check out.
Aussiegirl 03.02.05 at 10:35 pm
The backwards “R” drives me nuts too. Thanks for the tip - looks like an interesting book to check out.
Tom Bissell 03.03.05 at 8:27 pm
Hey–I just stumbled upon myself in your blog! That’s a nice and pleasant accident. Be sure I begged, begged, begged them not to do that Cyrillic nonsense: I did not write God Lives iyi St. Petersbtsrg. But I laid off, because the cover design itself is brilliant and I really love my publisher. Life is picking yr battles….
Andy 03.03.05 at 8:45 pm
God, it scares me that publishers still do that kind of shit, even after someone has pointed out to them just how stupid it is.
The cover design is pretty cool isn’t it? I think the book may just have to go on the bookshelf in my front room - the one where I put all my nice books, the ones that I’m not embarrassed to say I own. (They live on several larger bookshelfs that are hidden away in the office).
James 02.11.07 at 7:03 pm
For whatever it’s worth, I can add my endorsement of that book. It really is the best fiction about Central Asia I’ve read.
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