Linor Goralik - "Found Life" - Maya Vinokour

Linor Goralik discusses her book, Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview. She will be joined in conversation by Maya Vinokour.

At the Co-op 

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Presented in Partnership with CEERES, the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at the University of Chicago.

About the book: One of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd in all its forms, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal, including a wide range of experiments in different forms of micro-prose, is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, here translated for the first time.

In Found Life, speech, condensed to the extreme, captures a vivid picture of fleeting interactions in a quickly moving world. Goralik's works evoke an unconventional palette of moods and atmospheres—slight doubt, subtle sadness, vague unease—through accumulation of unexpected details and command over colloquial language. While calling up a range of voices, her works are marked by a distinct voice, simultaneously slightly naïve and deeply ironic. She is a keen observer of the female condition, recounting gendered tribulations with awareness and amusement. From spiritual rabbits and biblical zoos to poems about loss and comics about poetry, Goralik's colorful language and pervasive dark comedy capture the heights of ridiculousness and the depths of grief.

About the author: Linor Goralik is an award-winning contemporary Russian writer of flash fiction, poetry, essays, fairy tales, theater, and more. Found Life is her first book to appear in English. Goralik’s tour is co-sponsored by the Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund, of which she was a poetry fellow in 2016.

About the interlocutor: Maya Vinokour is a Faculty Fellow in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.

About the series: CEERES, pronounced /ˈsirēz/, is the acronym for the University of Chicago Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies. Together with the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, we are delighted to announce the launch of the CEERES of Voices Event Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations on books from or about Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Caucasus. The books being discussed are identified in a various ways: through publishers’ contacts with the bookstore or through faculty requests to CEERES to host the author.