Anastasia Edel grew up in southern Russia during the last years of the Soviet Union. She’s the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground (2016). Her prose has appeared in the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Project Syndicate Quartz, and World Literature Today. She teaches Russian culture and history at UC Berkeley’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Photo: Luiz Guimaraes / Unsplash
Follow a writer-flâneuse on a New York City odyssey, appreciating life’s smaller miracles in a city with many entry points.
West 32nd / Broadway. The...
With two world wars, revolutions, famines, colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million peo...
A broken foot is poor luck and a nuisance. It cancels everything from hikes to trips to Germany. It gives your insurance company an opportunity to feast and acquaints you with an orthopedist, often m...
It is not unusual for those on a quest to understand Russia to plough through Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy; the more adventurous add Bulgakov and Pasternak to their lists. Yet Russia of the twent...
Victor Pelevin is one of the most interesting writers to have come out of contemporary Russia. Though not widely known in the West, Pelevin is a cultural phenomenon in his native land; his work is rea...