Synopses & Reviews
In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, theres a ghost who wont keep quiet.
Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviators helmet; and Tanya, a student of hope, words, and color.
Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place that holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created with the materials at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museums director hears of an American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks as if Tanya might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collections worth. Enlisting the help of her neighbors, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.
Review
"Gina Ochsner has enough imagination to cover Siberia." --
Portland Mercury
"This book is poetry." --Salem Montly
"...keeping the reader from getting too comfortable are delightful, intriguing splashes of magical realism...Ochsner's fluid, poetic storytelling [conveys] dry wit and imaginative metaphors." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Grant[s] a rare glimpse of buoyant inner worlds that flourish through the frost."
--Publishers Weekly
"Gina Oschner's novel is enchanting, at once playful and poignant. With her marvelously light touch, she takes the rubble of post-Soviet Russia and turns it into gold."
--Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles and Madeleine Is Sleeping
"The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is a hilariously absurdist and deeply resonant debut novel. Gina Ochsner transforms ordinary lives into something magical and wise and glintingly beautiful." -- Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K
“Heartbreaking and funny and deeply moving, this beautifully wrought novel matters from first word to last. This is an absolutely original book, and Gina Ochsner is like no other writer I know at work today. She is at once a fabulist and a realist, a romantic and a cold-eyed recorder of the ways we rationalize our most intimate mistakes. Her love of both the written word and of humanity at large shine through on every page, and I couldn't stop reading this tale of the living and the dead, the loved and the unloved, the powerful and the oppressed. This is magical stuff -- The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight is whimsical, ghost-riven, satirical and darkly, richly, wonderfully redeeming.”
--Bret Lott, author of Jewel and A Song I Knew by Heart
Synopsis
"A captivating novel of secrets, love, and memory . . .This terrific novel knocked me out. Janet Fitch
Ochsnerbewitches the reader with layer upon layer of spellbinding storytelling . . .An astonishing alchemy of history, romance, and fable. Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Summoned to his mother s bedside as she nears the end of her life, young Maris must hear a new version, his mother s version, of his own story. Maris was born knowing things: his very large, very special ears enable him to hear the secrets of the dead, as well as the memories that haunt his Latvian hometown. Then, as a boy, Maris found himself heir to an odd assortment of hidden letters, letters from which he would weave a story that could finally expose and maybe even patch the holes in the fabric of his family and their town.With humor, heart, and her characteristic luminous writing and] affection for her characters (New York Times), Gina Ochsner creates an intimate, hopeful portrait of a fascinating town in all its complications and charm. From the onset of World War II through the cold shock of independence, we see how, despite years of distrust, a community can come through love and loss to the joy of understanding. "
Synopsis
FINALIST FOR THE OREGON BOOK AWARDS--KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION
"Intimate, vibrant, and richly colored."--Portland Monthly
" An] extraordinary feat of storytelling . . . A spellbinding novel as tough as it is beautiful." -- Helen Simonson, author of The Summer Before the War
"A beautifully spun tale . . . An astonishing alchemy of history, romance, and fable." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Maris was born knowing things: his very large, very special ears enable him to hear the secrets of the dead, as well as the memories that haunt his Latvian hometown. As a boy, Maris finds himself heir to an odd assortment of hidden letters, letters from which he would weave a story that could finally expose--and maybe even patch--the holes in the fabric of his family and their town.
With humor, heart, and her characteristic "luminous writing and] affection for her characters" (New York Times), Gina Ochsner creates an intimate, hopeful portrait of a fascinating town in all its complications and charm. From the onset of World War II through the cold shock of independence, we see how, despite years of distrust, a community can come through love and loss to the joy of understanding.
"A captivating novel of secrets, love, and memory . . . This terrific novel knocked me out." --Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black
"A gift on par with Joanne Harris's Chocolat . . . Quirky, ethereal, hilarious, and sorrowful." --Shelf Awareness
Synopsis
FINALIST FOR THE OREGON BOOK AWARDS--KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION
"Intimate, vibrant, and richly colored."--Portland Monthly " An] extraordinary feat of storytelling . . . A spellbinding novel as tough as it is beautiful." -- Helen Simonson, author of The Summer Before the War
"A beautifully spun tale . . . An astonishing alchemy of history, romance, and fable." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Maris was born knowing things: his very large, very special ears enable him to hear the secrets of the dead, as well as the memories that haunt his Latvian hometown. As a boy, Maris finds himself heir to an odd assortment of hidden letters, letters from which he would weave a story that could finally expose--and maybe even patch--the holes in the fabric of his family and their town.
With humor, heart, and her characteristic "luminous writing and] affection for her characters" (New York Times), Gina Ochsner creates an intimate, hopeful portrait of a fascinating town in all its complications and charm. From the onset of World War II through the cold shock of independence, we see how, despite years of distrust, a community can come through love and loss to the joy of understanding.
"A captivating novel of secrets, love, and memory . . . This terrific novel knocked me out." --Janet Fitch, author of Paint It Black
"A gift on par with Joanne Harris's Chocolat . . . Quirky, ethereal, hilarious, and sorrowful." --Shelf Awareness
Synopsis
Gina Ochsner's award-winning, highly acclaimed stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. In her eagerly anticipated new collection, Ochsner deftly examines the harrowing moments after a life or love slips away and discovers that the human heart can be large enough for anything.
A Russian couple come to accept their infertility by bidding farewell tot he ghosts of the children they never had. A disgruntled husband buys a talking bird that he hopes will restore love to his marriage. Twin sisters learn to prepare bodies for burial in their Hungarian parents' funeral home, but when faced with a death of their own, they must learn to prepare the soul. Glowing with warmth and sparkling with imagination, these stories are rendered with a deep understanding of human resilience as well as an unerring belief in small, daily miracles.
Synopsis
A fable-like, magical debut in which the author takes readers into her characters' dreams, and memories, and hearts, and shows the resilience of human hope and imagination in even the most unlikely, post-Soviet surroundings.
Synopsis
From a critically acclaimed fiction writer comes the moving story of a boy with extraordinary ears who—with the help of a cache of his great-grandmother’s letters—brings healing to a town burdened by the sins of its past
About the Author
GINA OCHSNER is the author of two collections of short stories, People I Wanted to Be and The Necessary Grace to Fall, both of which won the Oregon Book Award, and a novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, which was longslisted for the Orange Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award, the William Faulkner Prize, an NEA grant, a Guggenheim, and the Raymond Carver Prize. She lives in Oregon.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Articles of Faith / 1 Last Words of the Mynah Bird / 17 How One Carries Another / 27 Halves of a Whole / 47 A Darkness Held / 67 The Hurler / 90 From the Fourth Row / 98 A Blessing / 119 When the Dark Is Light Enough / 135 Signs and Markings / 158 The Fractious South / 181 Acknowledgments / 203