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Origin Stories: Sentence By Mikhail Iossel
Mikhail Iossel12 August 2025
SENTENCE originated the way most projects like this do—as a potentially exciting form of private diversion. I was looking, somewhat abstractly, for a different way of "doing" narrative—one that might potentially be as comfortable for me as a certain kind of an infinitely rolling, archetypal and (admittedly) largely non-existent Russian sentence used to be, back in my "first" life of an aspiring underground writer in Leningrad, USSR—a lifetime ago. And so, rather on a lark, I started writing those endlessly sinuous, instantaneously self-adjusting and self-correcting, memory-based stories, where everything happens in two or more dimensions of time and space, and where past and present constantly clash and dovetail and converge. It is, in a way, an experiment in the approximated simultaneity of the thought-word continuum, a running comment on the very process of writing as a mode of self-expression—and one, at that, unfolding in a non-native language.
In a certain sense—and one very personally important to me—it is a marker of the distance between my ability to express myself in English back when I first left the Soviet Union, almost 40 years ago—and now. It's a testament to one writer's life's path across the boundless field of literature. I believe it's an "earned" book, in that respect.
I am grateful to... well, lots of people in my life, of course; but as as far as this book is concerned, in particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to the late great Stan Perskly, who at one point had noticed a couple of these stories as my Facebook posts and subsequently asked my permission to serialize those, as well as future "one-sentence" texts of mine, in his online literary magazine. Without that extra motivation, SENTENCE might never come to exist.
It is my most personal and at the same time most unconventional book.
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Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is the author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling. Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal. |
