Steppe

Autostraddle, A Most Anticipated Queer Book of the Month
LGBTQ Reads, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

“Vasyakina does not shy away from depicting Russian reality in its minuscule detail. The reader will either recognize or be introduced to the vegetable markets on the outskirts of Moscow, the economics of a university education, and an entire stratum of prison-inflected pop culture. In fact, Vasyakina insists that you—yes, you—share or make these memories along the way … This mode of writing presupposes a common ground, but fear not: it works remarkably well in Elina Alter’s excellent translation. Vasyakina’s skillful command of the possibilities allowed by prose and poetry enables her to depict scenery with a precision that feels instantly recognizable to those already familiar with them, and physically palpable to those encountering them for the first time … [Steppe] does know something of death and, even more so, of life.” —Polina Peremitina, Full Stop

“Against the force of her stories, Vasyakina’s disembodied voice, her ambivalence, feels hypnotic … The story is both epic and infinitesimal.” —Bela Shayevich, The Whitney Review

“A clarifying portrait of post-Soviet Russian life, cycles of violence, and the ways that ideological training can seamlessly shift into behavior more suited for a criminal underworld. The more specific this narrative gets, the more searing its emotional connections become.” —Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

“Searing … Vasyakina brings an astute, lyrical eye to the time that father and daughter spend together, much of it on the road … The novel takes a piercing look at what is typically ignored—the barren landscape of the steppe, working-class lives, and the shape of suffering of someone who refuses to treat his illness … Steppe is a poetic illumination of those who don’t stop being and those who don’t stop mattering, an ode to the harsh beauty of its titular landscape.” —Anna Mebel, Asymptote

“Short but haunting … [Steppe] is part of a trilogy investigating the deaths of members of Vasyakina’s family. But it is also a portrait of a certain class of Russians, and by extension the history of Russia itself … [An] intensely observant book.” —Andrew Holleran, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

“An elegiac tribute to a fatally flawed bond.” —Kirkus Reviews

“In this compassionate and clear-eyed character study, Vasyakina traces the bond between a rough-hewn Siberian truck driver and his queer daughter … Vasyakina assembles a thoughtful and necessarily incomplete portrait of the father from the narrator’s musings on the harshness and violence of the post-Soviet era that shaped him. It’s a satisfying examination of how well a father and daughter can know one another.” —Publishers Weekly

“A family history, a road trip through contemporary Russia, Steppe is as unflinching and capacious as the landscape from which it takes its name. Vasyakina is a rare truthsayer, a voice of her generation. I loved this.” —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of Ghost Pains

“This is a gorgeously recursive book about daughters and fathers, about the unknowability. pain, and occasional tragedy of being fathered in the early twenty-first century, and the way we come to understand our own childhoods only as adults, when it’s all too late. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like Steppe, and at times when I was reading it felt so real and heartbreaking I could hardly stand it.” —Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest

“In Vasyakina’s prose, grief and isolation become luminous. When reading this dissociative and brilliant novel, one is reminded that to have a father is to inherit a fractured nation.” —Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive

Oksana Vasyakina is a Russian poet and curator. Her debut poetry collection, Women’s Prose, was short-listed for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2016, and her debut novel, Wound, won the NOS Prize in 2021.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Paris Review, and The New England Review, among other publications. She is the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.

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