Volume 31, Issue 4
The pen and ink drawings by Mihail Chemiakin on the front and back covers are from The Collected Poems and Songs of Vladimir Semenovich Vysotskii, 1938-1980.
Chemiakin, the celebrated Russian emigre painter and sculptor, was honored in the spring of 1989 with the first major retrospective exhibition of a Russian exiled artist, held at The Central House of the Artist in Moscow. He has lived in the U.S. since 1981.
Table of Contents
Russian Nationalism, by Andrey Sinyavsky
1845, Parnelly Pierce Draws the Night-Blooming Cereus; 1832, Kona Wind, Honolulu, Poetry by Nell Altizer
Their Dan, Fiction by Edith Pearlman
Mata Hari in Saint-Lazare Prison, 1917, Poetry by Judith Berke
Bapsi Sidhwa: An Interview, by David Montenegro
Sirens, Poetry by Indran Amirthanayagam
Biosphere II, Non-Fiction by Sharman Apt Russell
Dart, Poetry by Ricardo Pau-Llosa
All that Jazz, Poetry by Raúl Barrientos, Translated by Ben A. Heller
Abeyance, Fiction by Anne Whitney Pierce
“Plots and Plans”: Molly Bloom’s Fiction, Non-Fiction by Gail Hall
The Argument, Poetry by Carol Frost
OBSERVER Yiddish in the Soviet Union: A First-Person Report, Non-Fiction by Aaron Lansky, Translated by Dale E. Peterson
Contributors
Nell Altizer teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Hawaii; her poems have appeared in Calyx, Prairie Schooner and other literary journals.
Born in Sri Lanka, Indran Amirthanayagam has lived in England and now lives and works in New York City.
The poem in this issue of MR by Raúl Barrientos is the title poem of a selection of translations by the poet which recently won the Latin American Writers Institute Translation Award for Poetry and Short Fiction.
Judith Berke‘s collection of poems, White Morning, was published last year by Wesleyan Univ. Press.
Writer-in-residence at Hartwick College in New York state and a staff member at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Carol Frost has recently published a collection of poems, Chimera.
Gail Hall teaches literature and writing at Metropolitan College, Univ. of Bridgeport.
Ben A. Heller, poet and translator, lives in St. Louis.
Aaron Lansky is founder and president of the National Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst; he recently received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. The essay in this issue is excerpted from a longer piece which appeared originally in the Book Peddler. Copies and subscriptions are available from the National Yiddish Book Center, Old East Street School, Amherst, MA 01003.
David Montenegro‘s interview in this issue will be part of a collection, Points of Departure: Interviews with Ten International Writers on Writing and Politics, to be published by the Univ. of Michigan Press in the fall of 1991.
Art critic and curator, as well as professor of English at Miami Dade Community College, Ricardo Pau-Llosa has published work in numerous journals.
Edith Pearlman has received two O. Henry prizes and a PEN award; her stories have been published in a number of literary magazines including Boston Review, Iowa Review, and New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly.
Dale E. Peterson teaches Russian and American literature at Amherst College.
Anne Whitney Pierce‘s fiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review and other magazines.
While teaching developmental writing at Western New Mexico Univ., Sharman Apt Russell has published several books; the essay in this issue of MR is part of a collection to be called Forms of Gold: Essays from the Southwest.
Bapsi Sidhwa has published three novels; she has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute, and has taught at Columbia Univ., Rice Univ. and the Univ. of Houston.
Andrey Sinyavsky, as Abram Tertz, is a major figure in Russian thought and creative expression. The author of A Voice from the Chorus, a diary of his years in Soviet labor camps, he emigrated to Paris in 1973, teaches literature at the Sorbonne, and helps edit the journal Syntaxis. His most recent novel, Goodnight!, has been translated into English and published by Viking Penguin.