PR-manager of the publishing house "Scooter" Sasha Shadrina about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, PR manager of Samokat publishing house, founder of the courses Write like a Grrrl Russia, the site and the No Kidding reading group Sasha Shadrina shares her stories about favorite books.
I learned to read early: I was genuinely passionate about stories, I was excited and wanted to show myself. My parents gave me a large magnetic board with letters, my mother sat down to explain to me how they add up into syllables, and the syllables into words, and I read. The younger sister was wrong. Now we know what dyslexia is, but then mom was exhausted in trying to teach her to read and write, and after - to write correctly. I was praised for my success, and I proudly bore the title of a reading child. In addition, as a child, reading was very lonely, but a fascinating exercise — what the doctor ordered the child, about which everyone asks: “Is it so sad for her?”
Aidan Chambers, a teacher and popularizer of reading, says that in order to instill interest in reading, it is important to make books accessible. I have nothing to complain about here, we had a large library, my parents read. In early adolescence, I had special pocket money for books, and my mother gave me an exlibris with Exupery lamb.
The house had fancy books with gilded roots, which my mother bought in collections and exhibited them for glass. We lived in a provincial town, where more or less decent bookstores began to appear only by the middle of zero, and we wrote out books by mail. We regularly received thin catalogs in which much could be found: from books about fishing to the girl-best-selling series of the beginning of the century, Anne Shirley's Story, by Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery. In addition to the decent front books, we had a wardrobe of "exiles", with yellowing pages flying around, soft covers with traces of tea and coffee. It was the most interesting part. There I found Lewis Carroll's The Chronicles of Narnia, The Tale of the Knots, some amazing texts about English etiquette and other treasures.
When I was twenty-four, a very important, practically parent figure in the field of literature appeared in my life. I went to class with a young American writer, whom I later became friends with. We read English classics (some of them were recently) like John Cheever or Donald Bartelle, but I was particularly touched by women's prose - Alice Munro (she hadn’t been given a Nobel yet and she wasn’t published en masse in Russia), Lorry Moore, Grace Paley, Joan Didion, the very underground Lorrie Wicks. Working in an IT company then became like a swamp, my already dysfunctional relationship with my beloved man slowly decomposed, so these events became truly soul-saving. I still love the rhythm of regular meetings and preparation for them. Out of this love, our female riding groups No Kidding have grown.
After a year of such studies, I continued to form for myself the “secret” canon as opposed to the traditional “big” writers, modernists, beatniks, whom I read at a younger age. I finally discovered Silvia Plath, poetry, prose and diaries, the most interesting of which were destroyed by her husband Ted Hughes. I discovered lesbian literature like Aileen Miles and Michelle T. I began to read more non-fiction, not popular science, but memoir, essayistic, some texts at the intersection of truth and fiction, autofixing, critical texts with a strong interweaving of personal. Books from Amazon came in boxes. They filled the gap that I felt all the time, but could not verbalize, satisfied the basic reading needs - in identifying myself with the character, in representing the female, in looking at the world with my close eyes, and not through the eyes of Kerouac's heroes.
In September 2016, I launched a reading group that meets every two weeks. For our meetings, we read several short texts written by women. The difference of our group from many others is that we read precisely fiction, and not theoretical texts. The fact that a renaissance of the holding groups happened in Moscow inspires incredible enthusiasm. People read books about art, about feminist theory, Marxist theory, even about the theory of modern dance.
Reading women is a bit of a political project. In one of the cultural centers of Moscow, there is a riding group, where only two out of fifteen classes are devoted to women: Virginia Woolf and Donna Tartt. In the publishing plan of the project "The Hidden Gold of the 20th Century", which has collected almost a million rubles by crowdfunding and positioning itself as an educational one, there are no writers at all. It is clear that publishers do this at the call of the heart, and not because of special cunning, but this perfectly reflects the situation of gender bias in the industry, especially among independent publishers.
Silvia Plath
"Under the glass jar"
This book was presented to me by my friend Lena, with whom we met for five days in Paris in 2011. She bought it used at Amazon, read it on a trip and gave it to me. I accepted the gift, put it on the shelf at home and drove the next three years from the apartment to the apartment, being sure that I could not read it. Three years later, in the wake of the fascination of modern autobiographical female prose, I opened it and gasped, how well and slender it turned out, how much it feels like a predecessor of what I like in literature today. I noticed that when the book patiently waits for me, lives with me for a while, the effect of reading it only increases, as if I am grateful for her loyalty. This shabby book is especially dear to me, it is one of the canonical editions, a poketbook with a burgundy rose, with drawings of Plat inside.
This is the most important upbringing novel for me, “The Catcher in the Rye” for women, about which I tirelessly write and speak. One day at a meeting of a holding group, one of the participants said that she wrote a diploma on women's confessional prose after she met the mention of Plat in our blog. Her first half, in which the main character goes on an internship to New York, is a sample of witty, measured, dynamic prose. I hope this book will have a different, more dignified future in Russia, and readers will meet her at a younger age than me.
Jenny Rims
"In Gratitude"
The suicide memoirs of Jenny Diski, an English writer, author of the London Review of Books and her student Doris Lessing, are partly devoted to meeting and relationship with Doris, as she calls her. The second part is a diary of a cancer patient. I first came close to the disease when my grandfather was dying. The disease shook his personality to the ground, and for twenty years it was hard for me to watch, since childhood it seemed to me an unshakable lump. The discs are weakening, experiencing pain multiplied by inconvenience, ironically over themselves and over an attempt to write the next "cancer" diary, but remains itself, that is, the narrator. There is little consolation in this.
The story about Doris Lessing is a story about a parental figure, about meaningful gratitude and lack of gratitude where it is expected. It is pleasant to read about the dynamics of women's relations, destructive youth and stabilized maturity. The historical context is also very interesting: The Disks are a difficult teenager who hangs out in the company of the newly emerging left, drinks beer in pubs and sleeps with balding Marxists.
Christina Nichol
"Waiting for the Electricity"
I came across Christina Nicol’s book in Prospero's Books, Tbilisi, where the book stood on the table of the most interesting. I heard a lot about Kristina from a friend who studied with her on the writing master's program, as about the girl who wrote the book about Georgia. The book that materialized in front of me showed by all appearances that our meeting was not accidental.
Written by an American, this novel is about the post-Soviet Georgia of the nineties experiencing an energy crisis. The main character, a modest Slims Ahmed, a marine lawyer from Batumi, between waking dreams, trying to save or extract electricity, writes letters to Hillary Clinton, simultaneously comprehending the mysterious Georgian soul. This is a satire, but a satire of love, admiring. I really like the effect of "peeping" behind a familiar culture through the eyes of a stranger. On a trip to Georgia creates an exciting multi-dimensional effect.
Virginie Depant
"King Kong Theory"
I accidentally read this book and turned into feminism. Depant is a very famous figure in France who wrote the scandalous book “Fuck me,” which was once published in “Ultra. Culture” by Ilya Kormiltsev. According to her still shot the film. This is rumored to be a very effective book in the genre of rape and revenge, which was such a slap in the face to the public taste. She, however, I did not read.
"King Kong Theory" - is a collection of essays with a very vigorous preface, which immediately grabs the reader by the throat. Depant talks about the experience of the survivor of sexual abuse, about how she was a sex worker, about the structure of French society. Views on prostitution can be called rudimentary or not the most popular. The same France recently came to the "Swedish model", which implies the criminalization of the client, and not the legalization of prostitution. But, having re-read the book recently, I noticed that ideological differences do not prevent me from still loving the Depant. This is still the same very hard, very brave and very funny voice. I will never forget how many years I told in the company of male friends that I was reading a feminist book, and they blushed, turned pale and puffed out their cheeks.
Tuula Karjalainen
"Tove Jansson: Work and Love"
Tove Jansson is such a foundation. A woman and an artist who showed her life as much as possible. In a conservative country, she lived openly, freely, and was firm in her convictions. The second biography of Tove Jansson is written a little dryly, but solves an important task - shows Tuva not only as the author of "Moomin" or a writer, but equally as an artist. With the Freudian title "Work and Love", the book is obliged to the book exlibris, which was a young Tuva, - "Laborare et Amare". The most important things in her life, and in that order. Everything else, the book is very beautiful, with color illustrations, excerpts from the letters and diaries of Tuva. I don’t really appreciate the book as a material object, but this one will definitely decorate the library.
Julia Yakovleva
"Stolen City"
The book, recently published by the publishing house "Scooter", is the second part of the pentabook "Leningrad Fairy Tales", but it is quite readable as independent. In her young heroes Tanka, Shura and Bobka, whose parents were repressed in the previous part, find themselves with other Leningraders in the ring of blockade. Julia Yakovleva offers here is not devaluing, not cynical, in some way, a daring look at the blockade. Twelve-year-old Tanya, exhausted by hunger, says to her brother: "The city. He litters us like cockroaches. He is so beautiful. And we lived in it so ugly."
The book is also beautiful because there is no task to teach the "little reader". Julia herself in an interview once said that there are no good books for readers, but there are semantic levels to which you can connect at one or another age. The author is not a teacher here, but a skillful storyteller with an excellent, very active language. Recently, I included an excerpt from it in the setting on writing courses Write like a Grrrl. The girls liked the excerpt much more than any ornate Barbara Kingsolver, which made me very happy.
Katie Acker, Mackenzie Work
"I'm very into you"
E-mails by punk writers Katie Acker and media-theoretician Mackenzie Wark, published by Semiotext (e). Produce a sensation among all whom I advise them. The book is the work of my beloved contemporary writer Chris Kraus, who oversees in Semiotext (e) the exciting Native Agents series, consisting entirely of female subjective writing. Kraus is currently working on a biography of Katie Acker.
This book touched and embarrassed me, like any love speech. Here it is passed through a new medium of e-mail for the interlocutors, with whom they cannot always cope. Heroes talk about gender, sexuality, their performativity, what queer is, Simpsons, Portishead, Blanshaw, discussing lovers, confronting, making awkward confessions. The ending, remote in time from the main block of correspondence, is one of the most spectacular that I have ever read, it always makes my heart ache a little.
Chris Kraus
"I love dick"
This book was the successor to me of Sylvia Plath's Under the Glass Cover. Her heroine is experiencing something like a crisis of growing up, but at thirty-nine years old, with a failed career as a modern artist, in a dead end marriage and financial dependence on her husband, who has a weight in a party for those to whom she is drawn, with whom she relates. It seems the writer Sheila Heti once said that "I Love Dick" is an example of how much a form can withstand. This is an epistolary novel, where letters are written without any hope of response, and a traveler’s diary, and reflections on art and politics. Painful text, like pain from teething. And very funny. I came to the time as a sober view of the irregularity and great potential of inequality in heterosexual (and maybe in any partnership) relationships.
Maria Stepanova
"One, not one, not me"
Collection of essays by Maria Stepanova, published here and there. According to Stepanova herself, “somehow it came about that these are women's stories, stories of extreme loneliness, which can be viewed as a collection of samples, ways - how to work with this loneliness and how to resist it”. The most important text for me here is an essay about Susan Sontag, a text-glorification, read in one breath. There are many other heroines here - the same Plat, Alice Poret, Selma Lagerlöf, Lyubov Shaporina. Stepanova is one of my favorite modern poets. Her prose has a special rhythm and viscosity, it is contagious, from her a little fever. It is good that such a manner existed in the media space, especially when the texts go beyond the periodicals and are collected under one cover, echoing each other.
Alison behdel
"Fun Home"
The graphic novel by Alison Behdel, the one whose name is called the test, which is taken to screen a movie on the subject of sexism. This story brought Behdel commercial success, before that, from the eighties, she with varying success drew comics about "lesbians who should beware," but it was absolutely impossible to live on it. She writes about this crisis in more detail in her next graphic memoir on the relationship with her mother.
"Fun Home" is a story of the growing up of a girl who lives in a special house, adjacent to a funeral home, the family business of her parents. Her father is a hidden gay, and she herself realizes her homosexuality. Like many upbringing novels, this is such a metatext: the story of the heroine is intertwined with "Ulysses" of Joyce, "Outside" Camus, Colette's autobiography and a bunch of other important literature. The book will be released in Russian by the publishing house "Bumkniga".