I’m so delighted to see Dreams Under Glass included in this Buzzfeed Books list by Wendy J. Fox, “17 Recent And Upcoming Books From Indie Publishers You Need To Read,” among so many great books. Fox writes:

Dreams Under Glass captures both the struggle between art and economic stability and the deeply precarious nature of simply staying alive. A novel for our modern times.

See the whole list here.

I have been wanting to read The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine (Europa Editions, 2011) for years. I don’t know why other books kept getting in the way because I very much enjoyed finally reading this dark, prickly novel. Narrated by the highly unreliable Rosalina, a controlling matriarch in the Soviet Union who fears her daughter Sulfia is an inept mother to her granddaughter Aminat, the story is both hilarious and depressing. We learn about the effects of the Soviet Union on ethnic identity, the ways Rosalina twists things to get her way, and how this unravels in her attempts to marry Sulfia off to foreigners who could, in theory, help them leave the crumbling USSR. Each of these attempts feels quite tragic, even when successful!

Rosalina, or Rosie as her husband Kalganow calls her, knows little of her Tartar background, having grown up in an orphanage. Her husband’s family is also Tartar but she views them as back-country rubes—though she enjoys taking Sulfia to them as a child so she can drink their goat’s milk (viewed as nutritious to Rosalinda, and as vomit-inducing to Sulfia). Kalganow prefers to use Russian names—Sonja for Suflia, Anja for Aminat—he prefers to erase ethnic identity. But Rosie, who believes Aminat resembles her and who names her after her grandmother, “who’d grown up in the mountains,” insists on calling her Aminat and that she not become “just another Anja.”

As I mentioned, there’s a lot of humor that shows the sad state of things. Condoms are “rare and valuable” so while Rosalina believes child-rearing is a bad idea, she washes them and hangs them to dry for re-use: “I let them dangle from the clothesline in our room. I had a feeling that the longer they hung there, the less frequently my husband made advances on me.” A couple pages later, this image of dangling condoms is juxtaposed with horse meat sausages made by Kalganow’s relatives, hanging “out in the sun for several days.”

Rosalina is highly critical of just about everything and everyone. I found myself wondering what Alina Bronsky’s background was as the narrator poked fun at rural ways and especially as Jewish characters came into the picture and Rosalinda’s anti-Semitism comes out. Sulfia’s other daughter, by a Jewish man, is welcome to emigrate to Israel with her father; Rosalinda just doesn’t seem to care. I found this interview with Bronsky interesting, and I appreciated her insight into her sense of humor:

Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.

Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Books had some lovely things to say about my new chapbook Sugar: "It’s a delightful little amuse-bouche of a book, with an ending that will charm Seattleites and tourists alike." You can read more here.This Saturday at 3 pm at the Chin Music Press shop in Pike Place Market, I will be reading from Sugar, as well as some foodie excerpts from Daughters of the Air. The fabulous poets Montreux Rotholz and Alex Gallo-Brown will join me, and there will be treats. Constant says it's the literary event of the week! Here is the event on Facebook. Hope to see you there.