Set in both modern-day Boston and post-WWII Moscow, RUSSIAN WINTER tells the story of Bolshoi ballerina Nina Revskaya as she becomes a member of Stalin's cultural elite before escaping to the West following a terrible betrayal. Decades later, she has decided to auction off her famed jewelry collection—including the rare set of amber that a Boston professor, Grigori Solodin, translator of the works of Revskaya's late poet-husband, believes may hold the key to a long-kept secret. The literary mystery Grigori sets out to solve—with the help of Drew Brooks, a young associate at the Boston auction house—reaches much deeper: to the cost of making art and trying to live and love under circumstances of enormous repression.
A finalist in the James Jones First Novel competition, Russian Winter will be in bookstores September 7, 2010.
CALAMITY AND OTHER STORIES is a collection of loosely interrelated tales following three pairs of friends over three decades. With stories from Missouri Review, Good Housekeeping, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review and Prairie Schooner, the book was a Boston Herald "Editor's Choice" as well as one of five "Notable Books of 2005" profiled in Poets & Writers Magazine. It also made the short list for the 2005 Story Prize. The paperback version is now available and has been named an "Editor's Choice" by the Vancouver Sun. Perhaps more exciting, it was declared "perfect for the beach" by the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
