Book cover of Like Water and Other Stories

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Like Water and Other Stories as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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 …

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On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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