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How to pronounce Lara Vapnyar: Vap-nee-arh
Lara Vapnyar came to the US from Russia in 1994. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, and Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. She is the author of There Are Jews in My House, Memoirs of a Muse, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, The Scent of Pine, and Still Here. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper's, and Vogue.
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The protagonist of Memoirs of a Muse is a young
Russian immigrant named Tanya. Raised by her single mother, a professor,
Tanya escapes the drudgery of post-Cold War Moscow life by reading about
Apollinaria Suslova, Dostoevsky's mistress and muse. Tanya romanticizes
that she too one day will become a muse like Suslova. After graduating from
college, she immigrates to New York, but unlike her relatives before her, who
try in more conventional ways to assimilate to American culture, she holds on to
her ambition to be "special," to become the muse to a great American writer.
American readers might be
unfamiliar with an ambition like Tanya's, especially since the novel is set in
present-day New York City where most women define success quite differently, and
may initially misunderstand Tanya's idea of a muse as being intentionally
subservient to the man or artist. How does Tanya define the role of muse? Would
Tanya have wanted the same thing for herself in Russia? Does Tanya represent
something larger about young immigrant women?
First of all, Tanya has a very idealistic view of a role of
muse. She doesn't think that a muse is subservient to an artist, but...
Alina Adams was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and immigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1977 at age seven, where she learned English by watching American soap operas at their home in San Francisco.
Alina is a fiction ...
(more)
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Rachel is a prolific writer and reviewer and her work has appeared in the LA Review of Books, the Tel Aviv Review of Books and DeadDarlings. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis... (more)
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