What to do on a holiday weekend in the U.S. if you don't care about football? My answer is to look through my bookshelves to see what I've acquired and not gotten around to reading. Friday I discovered The Free World by David Bezmozgis and dug right in. Published in 2011, this book fits into the genre of origin stories for Soviet emigres ... how my family and I ended up in the Free World and what it meant for us. If you haven't heard of Bezmozgis, you should have. First of all, he was one of The New Yorker 's 20 under 40 in 2010. (Not sure how that feels to him 6 years later...) Secondly, what a great name -- the "is" at the end tells you he is originally from Latvia (not everyone knows that suffix game you can play with Soviet emigre surnames) but the "bez mozg" part is particularly fun for anyone who has studied Russian. "Bez" means "without" and "mozg" is brains. Another strike against him, perhaps, that his ...
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