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- Endling : a novel / by Reva, Maria,author.;
"In the absurdist literary tradition of George Saunders comes the debut novel of a writer who is "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews) and "bright, funny, satirical, relevant" (Margaret Atwood), chronicling the exploits of three Ukrainian women and one very endangered snail through the travails of foreign invasion, unlikely romance, capitalist exploitation, and nail-biting survival. Ukraine, 2022. Nastia and her sister, Solimaya, are entangled in the booming bridal industry, getting paid to entertain Western men who've come to Ukraine on "Romance Tours" to find their dream woman. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who's tried, and failed, to breed specimens from the region's dwindling snail population in her mobile lab. Nastia's obsession with finding her absent mother--a flamboyant protester who disappeared after years of public opposition to the romance tours--leads her to embark on the journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles along with three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a rare snail with one last shot at perpetuating his species. This journey, and these dreams, come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious and achingly raw metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances the comedic stakes set in motion by the plot while drawing on Reva's personal experiences as a Ukrainian expat, forced to witness the hostilities from afar while tracking her family's delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and real life combine on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What is it like to leave behind one's home and possessions? Conversely, what is it like to stay and continue with the mundanities of life and work under military occupation? For those of us witnessing from overseas: how does our sense of reality change? Can normalcy and security be restored, or have they always been an illusion? Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, telling a story of love, loss, humour, and devastation that only she could tell."--- Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Satirical fiction.; Novels.; Mail order brides; Russian Invasion of Ukraine, 2022; Sisters; Women biologists;
- Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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- Good citizens need not fear / by Reva, Maria,1989-author.;
"A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's ingenious novel-in-stories, intertwined narratives that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive. In "Bone Music," an agoraphobic woman survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen x-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in "Letter of Apology" becomes convinced he's being covertly recruited to guard Lenin's tomb, if only he can convince a contrarian poet to officially apologize for reciting a forbidden joke. Weaving the narratives together is an unforgettable, chameleon-like girl named Zaya: a disfigured orphan in "Little Rabbit," a beauty-pageant crasher in "Miss USSR," and, when she reaches adulthood, a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern bloc's newly minted oligarchs in "Homecoming." Good Citizens Need Not Fear takes us from moments of intense paranoia to surprising tenderness and back again, exploring what it means to be an individual amidst the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her and her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the black absurdism of early Shteyngart and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno to a fictional world that is as clever as it is heartfelt."--- Subjects: Historical fiction.; Political fiction.; Apartment houses;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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