Advance praise

Mikhail Iossel is one of our greatest contemporary writers. He carries the torch of Russian literary genius, writing with brilliance of the snake pit of Soviet Communism. His gift for characterization, vivid imagery and absurdity makes his work mesmerizing. His writing is unforgettable.

—David Evanier, author of Red Love

Sentence is a brilliant and breathless literary manifestation of speed that made me think of Gogol and the prose of Blaise Cendrars in his fictional trip on the Trans-Siberian express. Here, a brooding Russian Jew vividly recalls his Soviet childhood in a cramped communal apartment and the subsequent many losses he has experienced, ones that flash by like the view through the window of a fast train. Iossel’s narrator is moving and melancholy, insightful and aphoristic and unlike anyone else you are likely to read in contemporary writing. 

—Antanas Sileika, author of The Death of Tony

Mikhail Iossel has created a genre of his own—a mix of memoir, speculative fiction, philosophical reflection–and a flavoured language distinctly his, highly lyrical and melodic; Iossel is a sort of linguistic Paganini, delivering capriccios with a playful joy, and occasionally he decelerates in a melancholy way as he nostalgically reminisces about the passage of time, death, and his former life in the Soviet Union.

—Josip Novakovich, author of Rubble of Rubles

These one-sentence stories, some lasting only a moment, others zipping thrillingly through years and continents, tap deep into childhood, old age, friendship, memory, dislocation, and the act of writing itself—in other words, this messy, beautiful mortal life to which we have all been sentenced. They are also, in the face of every refusal, funny and tender, and suffused with hope. Mikhail Iossel is one of the most innovative writers of our time. 

—Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless as the Sky