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Canceled - Coming of Age in the Dust of the USSR with Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry and Katya Kazbek

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Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT April 5, 2022

Online via Zoom & at
The Center for Fiction*

This event has been canceled.

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry and Katya Kazbek come together in conversation about their two unflinching, exquisitely imaginative coming-of-age novels, each set in Moscow in the turbulent moments before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. In The Orchard, Gorcheva-Newberry’s powerful debut loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive. In Kazbek’s highly anticipated novel, Little Foxes Took Up Matches, protagonist Mitya explores late 90s Moscow, where crime, inequality, and social dogmas create a surreal backdrop to this unforgettable modern queer fable and powerful portrait of a family. Award-winning novelist Alex Halberstadt (Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus) will moderate the event.

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In Conversation

  • Gorcheva-Newberry © Ivan Morozov - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

    Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

    Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is a Russian-Armenian émigré who moved to the United States in 1995 after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Writing in English, her second language, she has published fifty stories and received nine Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Gorcheva-Newberry is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction; the Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; and the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction for her collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, which was long-listed for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award. She lives with her family, splitting her time between New York, Virginia, and Russia.

    Photo Credit: Ivan Morozov

  • Katya Kazbek credit Ivan Cosnyrev - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Katya Kazbek

    Katya Kazbek

    Katya Kazbek is a bilingual Russian/English writer, translator, and editor who cofounded the online magazine Supamodu. A graduate of Parsons and Oxford’s writing program, Kazbek received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives between New York, New York, and Moscow, Russia.

    Photo Credit: Ivan Cosnyrev

  • Halberstadt author photo-© Edward Burt - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Alex Halberstadt

    Alex Halberstadt

    Alex Halberstadt is the author of the award-winning Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Travel + Leisure, GQ, Saveur, and the Paris Review. He is a two-time James Beard Award nominee and a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He was educated at Oberlin College and Columbia University, and works and lives in New York.

    Photo Credit: Edward Burt