Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stor..., Maxim Osipov
Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stor..., Maxim Osipov
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Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Other Stories

Author: Maxim Osipov, Alex Fleming, Boris Dralyuk, Anne Marie Jackson

Narrator: Daniel Gamburg

Unabridged: 11 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/29/2019

Synopsis

The first English-language collection of a contemporary Russian master of the short story, who has been profiled in the New YorkerMaxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia’s best contemporary writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to write stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Osipov’s fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of life in provincial Russia—its tragedies, frustrations, and moments of humble beauty and inspiration. The twelve stories in this volume depict doctors, actors, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses, and common criminals whose paths intersect in unpredictable yet entirely natural ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices, and on trains and in planes. Their encounters lead to disasters, major and minor epiphanies, and—on occasion—the promise of redemption.

About Maxim Osipov

Maxim Osipov is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s, he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, he established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published five collections of prose, and his plays have been staged across Russia. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

About Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own, distinctive non-fiction genre which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Boys in Zinc (1991), Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Second-Hand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time'.

About Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk is an award-winning translator and the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews. He taught Russian literature for a number of years at UCLA and at the University of St Andrews.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on December 23, 2019

Towns, cities, countries, the entire world and the living of the planet dwellers: rare joys and frequent sorrows, squandered potentials and frittered away lives, luck and misery, knowledge and ignorance, hollowness of existence. Why don’t they go to Norway? “Fjords, the water’s so still, so smooth…” H......more

Goodreads review by Janet on February 25, 2021

This short story collection by contemporary Russian author Maxim Osipov, a doctor by trade, reminds me very much of Chekhov, not because of his medical background, but because of his storytelling style. Perhaps even more than Chekhov, Osipov allows his stories to 'collect' or build, slowly and obliq......more

Goodreads review by Luís on March 18, 2024

Contos sobre a vida quotidiana na Rússia. Sendo, Osipov, considerado um excelente contista, frequentemente, comparado com Chekhov, as suas características mais notórias são a sua perspicácia e sagacidade na observação e descrição de vidas e pessoas comuns. Ainda assim, e para mim, os seus contos são......more

Goodreads review by E.P. on July 11, 2019

In "Rock, Paper, Scissors," we meet a new Russia: one that stands with one foot in the recent Soviet past, one foot in the more distant past of Pushkin and Lermontov, and, well, a third foot in the Millennial post-Soviet present. And maybe a fourth foot in the West. Like Chekhov (and Bulgakov), Maxim......more

Goodreads review by Heronimo Gieronymus on May 28, 2019

A great many people in North America no doubt came to be familiar with Maxim Osipov by way of Joshua Yaffa’s profile of the cardiologist and author earlier this month in the NEW YORKER. Such readers were introduced to a man who did not start writing seriously until he was already in his forties and......more

Quotes

“[An] admirable range of characters and presentations.” Los Angeles Review of Books

“Maxim Osipov’s stories are kaleidoscopic. [He] is continuing Russian literature’s great love story with medicine, a flame lit by writer-physicians Mikhail Bulgakov and Anton Chekhov.” Calvert Journal

“The twelve scintillating short stories in Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories, the first English collection by cardiologist Maxim Osipov, are brilliant. Not one disappoints. Osipov’s style and subjects are reminiscent of Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev.” World Literature Today

“Stories about the absurdity, corruption, and daily mundanity of modern Russian life…a marvelous collection…Remarkable stories, threaded through with a bleak humor, describe life in the provinces of a Russia attempting to contend with the modern world.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] masterful and sublime collection, largely set in rural Russian villages…This collection showcases Osipov’s talent in creating subtle, sophisticated character portraits that carry a good dose of suspense.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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