Natasha And Other Stories - Couverture souple

David Bezmozgis's remarkable stories have already been acclaimed in the US and Canada when three appeared almost simultaneously in the New Yorker, Harper's and Zoetrope. In the space of a few weeks, these magazines introduced readers to the Bermans - Bella and Roman and their son Mark - Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams.

Natasha brings the Bermans - and the Russian Jewish enclaves of Toronto - to life in stories full of big, desperate, utterly believable consequence. In 'Tapka', six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbours upstairs. In 'Roman Berman, Massage Therapist', Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first, humiliating dinner with a North American family. In the title story, a stark, funny anatomy of first love, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia.

Bezmozgis writes with clarity and compassion about the pains and joys of immigration. Sad but comic, his stories are the literature of an immigrant community whose story has yet to be told, and their chronicler possesses an extraordinary gift.

(2003-10-17)

"Funny, heartbreaking, terrible, true" (Library Journal)

"Exquisitely crafted stories... A first collection that reads like the work of a past master" (T. Coraghessan Boyle)

"A sharp and compassionate picture of the immigrant experience... David Bezmozgis's ear for dialogue and emotional range have established him as a gifted writer, and possibly an heir to Saul Bellow and Mordecai Richler" (Observer 2005-11-13)

"Excellently written and quietly evocative... Haunting" (Time Out)

"Captures the emotional complexities of immigration with such skill that they immediately establish this young author" (Sunday Times)