That’s how I felt with Sophia Shalmiyev. She plays Fiona Apple and pours us tea. Her cozy apartment is decorated in a style I’d call feminist bohemian: overflowing bookshelves and a velvety couch. We had spoken briefly once before, at Our Words Are a Bridge, The Rumpus ’s Portland Lit Crawl event, which I emceed. Sophia Shalmiyev Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to America in 1990. She is a feminist writer and painter living in Portland with her two children. Mother Winter is her first book.
Sophia Shalmiyev’s Unbelievable Instincts The New York Times was Wrong About Mother Winter February 13, 2019 February 13, 2019 Katharine Coldiron 0 Comments Alexandra Fuller, Mother Winter, Pam Houston, Sophia Shalmiyev. An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her.
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“A rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound.
A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
'Shalmiyev stubbornly, brilliantly pursues loss in this psychogeography of immigration, grief displacement, and damage. A mother herself, Shalmiyev's narrator channels the ghosts of Dorothy Richardson, Anaïs Nin, Frances Farmer, and the sad, bad stories of Aileen Wuornos and Amy Fisher, who could never be the right kind of girls. Like the great modernist writers, Shalmiyev writes from, not about trauma, but at a pitch that's witty, dry, sad, and laconic. 'I love America,' her narrator declares. 'It's broken, like me.'
—Chris Kraus, Author Of I Love Dick
'The coldness of Russia, of the occult; the heat of punk rock, of motherhood. The psychic tear of emigration and motherlessness; a past gone into mystery. With sparse, poetic language, Shalmiyev builds a personal history that is fractured and raw; a brilliant, lovely ache.'
—Michelle Tea, critically-acclaimed author of Against Memoir
'When she leaves her native Russia at age eleven, Sophia Shalmiyev is forced to abandon a mother she may never see again. Leadcoretech driver download. Mother Winter is the wrenching story of her exile and grief, but it's also a chronicle of awakening—to art, sex, feminism, and the rich complexities of becoming a mother herself. Like a punk-rock Marguerite Duras, Shalmiyev has reinvented the language of longing. I love this gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable book.'
—Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
Download lcdmod kit driver. 'Mother Winter slices through the conventions of narrative with the most delicate blade, ribboning what you think you know about memoir, homecoming, what it means to live in a female body, to live as a motherless mother, to be mothered by art and the arms of all that is strong enough to hold you. This book hypnotized me with its beauty and brutality. I feasted on Shalmiyev's sentences, and they will stay with me for a long, long time.'
—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
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'The flickering alcoholic parent creates a writer by their absence. The kid colors the void, packs it with stuff, a life, and a love. Infocity driver download. And thus she lives. Mother Winter, Sophia Shalmiyev’s catastrophically bright, wavering motion of a memoir, forged through sticky clouds of pain, is vividly awesome and truly great.'
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—Eileen Myles, author of Evolution
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