Why did Katya love this book?
Having lived in the former Soviet Union earlier this century I enjoyed the author’s inclusion of stories set in Russia as well as the United States.
The characters in the stories are outsiders in the cities where they live as well as in their own lives (on occasion), a feeling that I believe many of us experience at some point. The beauty of short stories is how they offer a window into a different world that is foreign and yet comfortingly familiar at the same time.
The world in these stories is both mundane – office scenes and family visits – and surreal with babies being shipped to New York for publication.
1 author picked Like Water and Other Stories as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Fiction. California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg's stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self--and in ways that are often bewildering--against an…