Sentence: Stories

In Sentence, Mikhail Iossel performs a remarkable juggling act between genres and countries. Can you write a "Russian" sentence in English? The author has found a perfect syntactical solution to the opposition of past and present in this groundbreaking collection of one-sentence stories: everything is simultaneous, breathless, in a dizzying spin of memory and imagination. The past and the present are inseparable—but the sentence is here, as a celebration of linguistic freedom and virtuosity.

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is the author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling. Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.