Manic Bookstore Cafe

Last week I spent two days at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where my friend and colleague Catherine O'Neil leads a STARTALK program every summer. This government-supported language school runs four weeks, from 8:30-3:30 every day, and features fabulous language teachers from the Naval Academy. With a goal of 90% Russian language every day, the teachers have to be imaginative (after all, they don't take total beginners, but some of their students have had only a year of formal language training). They do exercises and readings, have conversations, play games and watch films (including Volodymyr Zelensky in Servant of the People , conveniently available on Netflix this summer). All in Russian. I also learned about their coffee break every morning, during which students have to go to the "cafe" and ask the grouchy post-Soviet barista (one of the fabulous instructors) for coffee, tea, or anything else they like. That seems brilliant--on the one hand the students...

Check out the window, lower left. NOTE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN MID-DECEMBER AND REMAINED IN DRAFT FORM. TIME TO RELEASE IT AND GET BACK TO BLOGGING. Wednesday night we did our first public reading of Russian Cuisine in Exile in Milwaukee. Tom Feerick -- formerly my undergraduate student, now a second year grad student at Northwestern -- drove up from Evanston, while I drove over and up from my dad's house in Barrington. (On Thursday we met in Hyde Park for round two.)  In brief, translators on tour. What can I say? It was terrific fun. We were in "dialogue" with Joe Peschio, the brilliant and funny Russian prof at UW-Milwaukee who helped set up the event. Boswell Books is fantastic -- a large space with really well-curated offerings. I will make it a destination in future for stocking up for my own library and for gifts. The manager, Daniel, was gracious and sweet, and the audience settled right into comfy chairs and sofas to listen to us chat. As we were p...

This has been an exciting week for me on the publishing front. Academic Studies Press sent out marketing postcards for our book, which is coming out in about a month. The cover of the new book. Note the cool design elements! I have read and loved this book for thirty years, and I've been working with one or another version of the essays with students for almost five. Now the full translation of  Russian Cuisine in Exile will finally offer English-speaking audiences a chance to explore these forty-four essays (with recipes) for themselves. Original Cover In 1987 Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis collected their columns into a little book.  Russian Cuisine in Exile  for me evokes Russian Literature in Exile ( Русская литература в изгнании ), a book by Prof. Gleb Struve originally published in 1956 (and never translated into English, to my knowledge). Struve, who by that time was faculty at Berkeley, was a part of the first-wave of emigration after the Russian Re...