Latest Review: "The Wall in My Head" by Words Without Borders (eds.)

I know we’ve been pretty quiet on the book reviewing front (but soon—I really want to recommend the new Brandao book . . .), but at long last, we’ve added a piece on The Wall in My Head to our Review section.

I would be tempted to apologize for the self-promotional nature of posting a review of one of our own books (god knows why, that’s exactly how other publishers use their blogs), but this book came into existence thanks to Alane Mason, Rohan Kamicheril, Sal Robinson, Gemma Bentley, and the wonderful people at Words Without Borders. They deserve a ton of credit—even more than can be delivered in this glowing review.

As a sidenote, we are having a special event for this book next Tuesday at Idlewild Books in New York City. Event starts at 6pm and features Dorota Maslowska (Poland), the author of Snow White and Russian Red, and winner of the Nike prize; Dan Sociu(Romania), the author of Urbancholia; Masha Gessen (Russia), author of Ester and Ruzya: How my Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace; and Kathrin Aehnlich (Germany), author of Alle Sterben, auch Die Loeffelstoere. The event will be moderated by Eliot Borenstein, Chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, and the author of Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture.

But on with the review . . . This was written by Jessica LeTourneur, who is from Chicago, attended NYU’s Publishing Institute in 2005, has worked as a journalist, a librarian, an indie bookstore clerk, and once upon a time, at The Missouri Review and W. W. Norton & Company, and currently is pursuing a Master’s degree in History and Scholarly Publishing at Arizona State University.

Here’s the opening of her piece:

I was born in the final decade of communism’s flailing grasp on the Eastern Bloc, and so what I know of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism has long been relegated to what I learned from middle school textbooks, and teachers who had to explain to us why those maps we were so diligently studying were made obsolete overnight. The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain has aided in filling in that gap in my education through its poignant words and images that have left an indelible impression upon me long after I turned the last page. For me, the globe I keep on top of my bookcase from the early 1980s is a quirky relic, but for those whose contributions make up this extraordinary book, those lines and colors that have been redrawn in the past two decades were once ‘home’.

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall coming up—it takes place next week on November 9th—this tremendous, and at times wrenching compilation of stories and images is a truly revelatory experience for any reader, no matter what country or decade they were born into.

This book is also a prime example of the quality anthologies that Words Without Borders has put out into the marketplace over the past several years. (Other publications include Literature from the Axis of Evil: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Other Enemy Nations, New Press, September 2006, and Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers, Anchor Books, March 2007).

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is an exceptional anthology that is jointly published by Words Without Borders and Open Letter Books. It contains stories written by the greats whose names are immediately recognizable—Milan Kundera, Vladimir Sorokin, Peter Esterhazy, as well as those who may be lesser-known in the United States (for now), but are nonetheless astonishingly talented writers and artists.

Click here for the full review.