A Novel
by Oksana Vasyakina
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2023
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
For fans of Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, the lyrical and deeply moving story of a young queer woman's journey across Russia to inter her mother's ashes and to understand her sexuality, femininity, and grief
From one of Russia's most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother's ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her past, the narrator of Oksana Vasyakina's autobiographical novel meditates on queerness, death, and love and finds new words for understanding her relationship with her mother, her country, her sexuality, and her identity as an artist.
A sensual, whip-smart account of the complicated dynamics of queer life in present-day Siberia and Moscow, Wound is also in conversation with feminist thinkers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Monique Wittig, locating Vasyakina's work in a rich and exciting international literary tradition.
"[A] stirring English-language debut ... The narrative is distinguished by its dry wit and philosophical import, which Alter ... renders in razor-sharp prose ... Vasyakina stuns with this bold and emotionally raw chronicle." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Vasyakina uses every tool at her disposal to try and make sense of death and its relation to memory. What's left is a deeply intimate novel, and the sense that the mother-daughter relationship at its heart is evolving still." —Booklist
"A target of censorship in Russia, Wound holds nothing back in its exploration of complex relationships, including lesbian ones ... A wide-ranging novel that reflects on death, grief, womanhood, creativity, and women's sexuality." —Foreword Reviews
"One of Russia's most exciting new voices ... A sensual, whip-smart account of the complicated dynamics of queer life in present-day Siberia and Moscow, Wound is also in conversation with feminist thinkers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Monique Wittig, locating Vasyakina's work in a rich and exciting international literary tradition." —LGBTQ Reads, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
"Oksana Vasyakina's sensitive novel about the death of her mother doubles as a ferociously intelligent portrait of a vast and brutal country, traumEugeneatized by traumatized men. Elina Alter does justice to Vasyakina's style, whose clarity and unpretentiousness results in a work of great inner power." —Eugene Ostashevsky, author of The Feeling Sonnets
"In this moving, poetic autobiographical novel, family trauma is inseparable from national history. Returning to Siberia with her mother's ashes, a daughter revisits the primal scenes of four generations. In the process, she invents a new way of existing as a queer woman from the Russian provinces." —Sophie Pinkham, author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine
This information about Wound was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Oksana Vasyakina is a Russian poet and curator. Her debut poetry collection, Women's Prose, was short-listed for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2016, and the original Russian-language edition of Wound won the NOS Prize in 2021. She lives in Moscow, where she teaches courses on writing and feminist literature.
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Paris Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.
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