From Powells.com
Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.
Our favorite books of the year.
The Best Books of 2019 (So Far)
Staff Pick
When I read it back in March, Mother Winter immediately popped to the top of my best books list for 2019. Portland author Sophia Shalmiyev tells her personal story of strength and perseverance with sharp honesty and vivid scenes. Any mother, feminist, artist, son or daughter, or immigrant will appreciate the gift Sophia has shared with us. Recommended By Kim S., Powells.com
Fiercely feminist, deeply meditative, and constantly evocative, I found myself inescapably engrossed in Shalmiyev's Mother Winter from the very first sentence. From her seamless integration of literary influences to her grappling with memory, loss, familial violence, longing, and motherhood, I found every aspect of Shalmiyev's hybrid beast of a memoir deftly handled and beautifully realized. Recommended By Darla M., Powells.com
Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev is a poetic collage of a memoir, more like a work of art. Honest and fascinating. Gorgeous, stunning prose. Exquisite execution. Shalmiyev swept me away with her imagery and deep probing insight. Loved this book! Recommended By Adrienne C., Powells.com
Lyrical and raw, Mother Winter is Sophia Shalmiyev’s exploration of leaving Russia with her father at age 11, and of her relationship with her absent mother. Filled with hard-won insight, Shalmiyev’s prose is both searing and meditative. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Vividly awesome and truly great." Eileen Myles
"I love this gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable book." Leni Zumas
"A rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev's flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her.
Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking, lyrical memoir, Mother Winter. To understand the end of her story we must go back to her beginning.
Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). An imbalance of power and the prevalence of antisemitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America, abandoning her estranged mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her.
Now a mother herself, in Mother Winter Shalmiyev depicts in urgent vignettes her emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. She tells of her early days in St. Petersburg, a land unkind to women, wayward or otherwise; her tumultuous pit-stop in Italy as a refugee on her way to America; the life she built for herself in the Pacific Northwest, raising two children of her own; and ultimately, her cathartic voyage back to Russia as an adult, where she searched endlessly for the alcoholic mother she never knew. Braided into her physical journey is a metaphorical exploration of the many surrogate mothers Shalmiyev sought out in place of her own — whether in books, art, lovers, or other lost souls banded together by their misfortunes.
Mother Winter is the story of Shalmiyev's years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connection with the worlds she occupies — the result is a searing observation of the human heart and psyche's many shades across time and culture. As critically acclaimed author Michelle Tea says, "with sparse, poetic language Shalmiyev builds a personal history that is fractured and raw; a brilliant, lovely ache."
Review
"Mother Winter slices through the conventions of narrative with the most delicate blade, ribboning what you think you know about memoir, homecoming, what it means to live in a female body, to live as a motherless mother, to be mothered by art and the arms of all that is strong enough to hold you. This book hypnotized me with its beauty and brutality." MELISSA FEBOS, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
Review
"Mother Winter is lyrical (an over-used adjective but apt here) and gutsy, delicate and meaty at once. [Shalmiyev] weaves together memoir and meditations on language, her own motherhood, and the writers and artists that she worshiped as her 'feminist mothers' in place of the real thing." Lithub
Review
"A rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"The flickering alcoholic parent creates a writer by their absence. The kid colors the void, packs it with stuff, a life, and a love. And thus she lives. Mother Winter, Sophia Shalmiyev’s catastrophically bright, wavering motion of a memoir, forged through sticky clouds of pain, is vividly awesome and truly great." EILEEN MYLES, author of Evolution
About the Author
Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, she was the nonfiction editor for The Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurels Scholarship and numerous Kellogg’s Fellowship awards. She has a second master’s degree in creative arts therapy from The School of Visual Arts, previously counseling survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in Vela Magazine, Entropy, Electric Lit, The Seattle Review of Books, Ravishly, and The Literary Review, among others; all with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland with her two children. Mother Winter is her first book.
Sophia Shalmiyev on PowellsBooks.Blog
Mother Winter is a hybrid that is billed as a memoir. I began the book after my second child was born and I was brought low, corporeally, spiritually, and creatively, by the tugs and pulls on my body, time, and brain. I decided that I would get militant about my writing, as militant as I had always wished to be about my feminism, à la Silvia Federici...
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Sophia Shalmiyev on PowellsBooks.Blog
This is the song I would say describes how I really feel inside and who I want to be. If I could have written any song in the whole wide world, this would be the one...
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