All posts tagged: Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Review: What Isn’t Remembered by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Story collection by KRISTINA GORCHEVA-NEWBERRY

Review by JULIA LICHTBLAU

Cover Page for What Isn't Remembered, by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry. The book cover has a scene of a lighthouse near the water, with a blocky and colorful art style.

There are two Russias in Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s passionate and accomplished debut short-story collection, What Isn’t Remembered, winner of the 2021 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize. The geographical country, where many of the stories take place, and the mental state of Russianness, which characters carry with them in the diaspora. There is also America, an alluring, often disappointing exile—and there are Americans, mostly well-meaning, who struggle to live with their mercurial Russian lovers, spouses, friends, or children, whose Russianness comprises the psychic ramifications of political and historical traumas going back multiple generations—World War II, Soviet rule, the chaotic break-up of the USSR, or the Armenian genocide, to name a few.

Review: What Isn’t Remembered by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
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