
The author's first book, published after he had emigrated. An autobiographical account of his years of failed attempts to get into print back home in the Soviet Union.

Twelve stories from the working life of a Soviet newspaper reporter in Tallinn, each setting an upbeat published item against what really stood behind it.

A camp guard's notes drawn from the author's own army service in the prison camps, seeing a zone where guards and inmates turn out to be people of the same stock.

An unsettled writer takes a job as a guide at the Pushkin estate museum while his family life falls apart and the question of leaving the country hangs over him.

A family album in stories: several generations of the author's relatives, from his grandfather to his own son, with the whole Soviet century showing through their lives.

Notes on the writing trade and the daily grind of editorial work, tracing the road from an unpublished author in Leningrad to a Russian newspaper in emigration.

An old suitcase taken abroad in emigration, and inside it a handful of odd things, each with its own story from the earlier life in Leningrad.

A young woman from a comfortable Soviet family ends up alone with a child in the Russian quarter of New York, among fellow emigrants like herself.

A Russian journalist at an emigre radio station in America travels to a conference of his countrymen, where a long-lost love from his former life unexpectedly turns up.