Bob Blaisdell teaches English in Brooklyn at Kingsborough Community College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and Christian Science Monitor and the editor of more than three dozen anthologies for Dover Publications. Email him at Robert.Blaisdell@Kingsborough.edu.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Risky Rasskazy: Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Thoroughly Unsentimental “Sentimental Tales”
Bob Blaisdell considers the six longer stories collected in Mikhail Zoshchenko’s “Sentimental Tales,” newly translated by Boris Dralyuk....
Daddy’s Issues: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Spring”
If you still haven’t tried Knausgaard or have been unsatisfied with his helplessly casual "New York Times" travel essays, try "Spring."...
Class Acts
A new memoir about refugee teenagers in a Denver high school....
A Brilliant Mind’s Pauses: The Fiction of Russia’s Greatest Poet
Bob Blaisdell praises the prose of Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin....
What Rubbish They Publish
The Prank proves Anton Chekhov could write hilarious stories from an early age....
An Anna Is an Anna Is an Anna
Translators of Anna Karenina are wonderful — except for their annoying habit of denigrating the work of earlier ones....
Mentors: Marvin Mudrick
I would not tear papers apart — say they're no good and say they don't work — unless I believed that all of you are capable of writing good fiction....
BLARB BLOG POSTS
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Knausgaard and War and Peace
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Conversing with Thoreau: An Interview with Laura Dassow Walls
