PearlyBooks

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Product Description
A Minneapolis Star Tribune Best Book of 2014 Recommended by The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Alan Cheuse of NPR, Grantland Shortlisted for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award
A 'ruminative!lovely!accomplished' (The New York Times Book Review) and 'touching' (The Seattle Times) debut collection of stories that 'sparkles with the brilliance and charm of Chekhov.' (Simon Van Booy, award-winning author of Love Begins in Winter and The Illusion of Separateness)
Kseniya Melnik's Snow in May introduces a cast of characters bound by their relationship to the port town of Magadan in Russia's Far East, a former gateway for prisoners assigned to Stalin's forced-labor camps. Comprised of a surprising mix of newly minted professionals, ex-prisoners, intellectuals, musicians, and faithful Party workers, the community is vibrant and resilient and life in Magadan thrives even under the cover of near-perpetual snow. By blending history and fable, each of Melnik's stories transports us somewhere completely new: a married Magadan woman considers a proposition from an Italian footballer in '70s Moscow; an ailing young girl visits a witch doctor's house where nothing is as it seems; a middle-aged dance teacher is entranced by a new student's raw talent; a former Soviet boss tells his granddaughter the story of a thorny friendship; and a woman in 1958 jumps into a marriage with an army officer far too soon.
Weaving in and out of the last half of the twentieth century, Snow in May is an inventive, gorgeously rendered, and touching portrait of lives lived on the periphery where, despite their isolationand perhaps because of itthe most seemingly insignificant moments can be beautiful, haunting, and effervescent.a
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In her first book, Melnik's nine tender, linked stories constitute a stark mural painted against the backdrop of political change in late-twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, images only a Russian could craft. Pre-perestroika, post-perestroika, it all makes little difference to the residents of cold, snowbound Magadan on the northeast Russian coast. Melnik knows these people well, and portrays them and their determination, stoicism in the face of regime changes, and dry sense of dark humor with an economy of language that mirrors their economy of life. There is the young mid-century woman who yearns only to escape the crowded bed she shares with her two sisters and who grasps at the only available route, marriage. She learns too late that life as a military officer's wife can be its own punishment. The glasnost generation differs little, caught up as it is in the fantasies that television delivers. It's difficult to pick a favorite among Melnik's striking tales, but Love, Italian Style, the story of busy working mother Tanya on a trip from Magadan to Moscow to stock up on provisions, creates a surge of poignancy that sets the tone for all the others in this affecting and timely collection. --Donna Chavez
About the Author
Kseniya Melnik was born in Magadan, in the northeast of Russia, and immigrated to Alaska at age fifteen. She earned an MFA from New York University and her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Epoch, Prospect (UK), Virginia Quarterly Review, and was selected for Granta Magazine's New Voices series. She lives in El Paso, Texas.
Review
'Ruminative...Lovely...Accomplished...'Snow in May' takes us deep into the complex fabric of Magadan, an isolated fishing and mining town in the northern reaches of Russia that once served as a transit center for prisoners dispatched to Stalin's labor camps. With this rich setting as backdrop