March 01, 2021 Sputnik V: First Place or Long Shot? The Russia vaccine seems top-notch, but low public trust and a botched rollout remain formidable barriers to returning to normalcy.
November 01, 2019 The Gunmaker The whole world knows the word “Kalashnikov.” What kind of a man was Mikhail Kalashnikov? And can we ever separate the man from the legends that surround him and his AK-47?
March 01, 2021 Can't Bear to Watch A nurse injects a performer in a bear costume with Russia’s Gam- COVID-Vac vaccine (under the brand name of Sputnik V) at a temporary COVID-19 vaccination site in Moscow’s Shchyolkovsky shopping centre.
May 05, 2021 Sputnik V is Quite Alright “The fact of the matter is, 80 or 85% of Serbians want the Russian vaccine Sputnik V." – Down with the naysayers! On May 4, Russian news outlet Izvestiya published a written interview with the Serbian Ambassador Miroslav Lazanski where he explained that, while Serbians choose themselves which vaccine they will receive, the majority would prefer Sputnik V. Remember when The world poo-poo’d the Russian decision to vaccinate without full clinical trials? It looks like not everyone’s complaining these days…
April 08, 2021 Play-Doh, Vaccinated Pets, and Irish Whiskey In this week's Odder News: the Play-Doh version of Moscow, the Russian version of Irish whiskey, and the Red Bull version of ice skating.
March 29, 2021 Who's Not Done With Quarantine? Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs was caught with his mask up while on a work trip to China.
February 11, 2021 Sputnik Rap, Dolls, and Animal Skulls In this week's Odder News, how one man spent his pandemic, prisoners teach us how to get out of the pandemic, and a new video game connects you to the Russian police.
September 17, 2020 Odder News for Radical Dudes This week, we're abandoning all pretense of mature adulthood. We've got cool shotguns, exploding caves, and a teacher who just couldn't wait. Gosh, mom, get out of my room!
Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction For over 100 years, most of the science fiction produced by the world’s largest country has been beyond the reach of Western readers. This new collection changes that, bringing a large body of influential works into the English orbit.
Far & Away ~ Tales from Rural Russia 33 original stories about modern (and not so modern) life in rural Russia.
Woe From Wit (bilingual) One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
Tolstoy Bilingual This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious.
Resilience: Life Stories of Centenarians Born in the Year of Revolution Call it resilience, grit, or just perseverance – it takes a special sort of person to have survived the last 100 years of Russian and Soviet history.
Driving Down Russia's Spine The story of the epic Spine of Russia trip, intertwining fascinating subject profiles with digressions into historical and cultural themes relevant to understanding modern Russia.
Maria's War: A Soldier's Autobiography This astonishingly gripping autobiography by the founder of the Russian Women’s Death Battallion in World War I is an eye-opening documentary of life before, during and after the Bolshevik Revolution.
93 Untranslatable Russian Words Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
Okudzhava Bilingual Poems, songs and autobiographical sketches by Bulat Okudzhava, the king of the Russian bards.
Resilience ~ The Russian Version (Переживем) Call it resilience, grit, or just perseverance – it takes a special sort of person to have survived the last 100 years of Russian and Soviet history.
Moscow and Muscovites Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin.
Marooned in Moscow This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
