Yelena Shmulenson

"An extraordinary debut, a deeply lovely novel that evokes with uncommon deftness the terrible, heartbreaking beauty that is life in wartime. Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean's exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel."  - Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times Bestselling...

Russia 1917: Beautiful, educated Svetlana Petrova defied her stifling aristocratic family to join a revolution promising freedom. Now, released after years of imprisonment, she discovers her socialist party vying for power against the dictatorial Bolsheviks and her beloved uncle, a champion of her cause, was murdered by a mysterious assassin named Orlova. Her signature? Blinding her victims before she kills them. Svetlana resolves to avenge his death...

"Sisters Vera and Marya were brought up as good Soviets: obedient despite hardships of poverty and tragedy, committed to communist ideals, and loyal to Stalin. Several years after fighting on the Eastern front, both women find themselves deep in the mire of conflicts shaping a new world order in 1947 Berlin. When Marya, an interpreter, gets entangled in Vera's cryptic web of deceit and betrayal, she must make desperate choices to survive - and protect...

Pregnant and adrift in the countryside amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War, Marina returns to a decimated Petrograd, where her work caring for war orphans inspires her emergence as a poet. -- Marina Makarova finds herself -- pregnant and adrift amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War. She finds new strength and self-reliance to fortify her in her sojourn, and to prepare her for the hardships and dilemmas still to come. Returning to...

Despite Queen Victoria's dire warnings, princesses Alix and Ella fall in love with Russia and the Romanovs as Ella weds the tsar's brother and Alix marries the heir apparent to the Russian throne, leading to tragic consequences for themselves, their families and for millions in Russia and around the world.

Two award-winning works of fiction by one of America's finest writers, together in one collection. In "The Shawl," a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In "Rosa," that same woman appears thirty years later, "a mad woman and a scavenger" in a Miami hotel. She has no life in the present because her past will never end. In both stories, there is a shawl-a shawl that can sustain a starving child, inadvertently...

Offers science fiction and fantasy stories from American authors, including Alix E. Harrow, Stephen Graham Jones, chosen by editor R. F. Kuang.

"A riveting novel about two women--one Serbian, one Bosnian--whose friendship spans decades and continents, war and peace, love and estrangement, in the vein of Elena Ferrante and Julia Alvarez. Closer than sisters, Lara and Marija share everything, from stolen fruit and Hollywood movies as girls to ideologies and even lovers as young women. But when the Bosnian War pits their homelands against each other in a bloodbath, Lara and Marija are forced...