Preview: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner

Amazon Book Stats:Hardcover: 384 pages

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (February 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618563733
• ISBN-13: 978-0618563739 
• Genre: Slipstream/Magical Realism

Book Info:   In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there's a ghost who won't keep quiet.

Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living. His wife, Azade, supervises the porta-toilet in the courtyard while worrying over a gang of feral children. Olga, a translator/censor for a military newspaper, frets about Yuri, her army-veteran son who always wears an aviator’s helmet. And Yuri's girlfriend, Zoya, just wants to own some modern things.

But then there is Tanya. Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her observations and her dreams, one of which is to become a flight attendant so she can escape her job the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum and soar through the clouds. But when the director hears of a mysterious American group looking to fund art in Russia, he charges Tanya with luring the Americans to their museum-- which holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knock-offs that have been created using the tools at hand, from foam to chewing gum, popsicle sticks to tomato juice. But while Tanya scrambles to save her dreams and her neighbors, she might be getting closer to finding love right in her own courtyard.

And so in Ochsner's fable-like, magical debut, we see the transcendence of imagination. As Colum McCann has said: "[Ochsner] manages... to capture our sundry human moments and make raw and unforgettable music of them."

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Author Bio:

Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program.  Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts.  Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review.

 

She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award  A novel entitled The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight has just been released. Here is a link to the author’s website.

 

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This book was received via the publisher by request through Net Galley. A big thanks to both. Review coming soon!

Thanks for reading Layers of Thought.