Red Bread Paperback - 2000

One of the best essayists writing in Russian today, Alexander Genis inhabits that stimulating borderland between the civilizations of Russia and America, created by the "great migration."
Born in 1953 in Soviet Latvia, Genis emigrated in 1977 to the United States. There he teamed with Peter Vail to write such contemporary classics as Native Tongue, a new look at Russian literature; Paradise Lost: Russian Cuisine in Exile; Americana, reflections on Russian-American cross-cultural phenomena, and Inside the Soviet Mind, aphoristic reminiscences of the Soviet 1960s.Says Genis: "Soviet rule began 36 years before I was born and ended 36 years after with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although I was born in the middle of this epoch, I feel less a witness to it than a refugee from it. My life has always consisted of personal events, nothing historical. Which is why I dare to review the past. I am a slave to the common-sense narrative."
Since 1990, Genis has been writing on his own. His books include Russian Postmodernism, new perspectives on post-Soviet culture; Dovlatov and Environs, literary nonfiction (the book was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize in 1999); Tower of Babel, a collection of cultural studies on the fin de siecle state of the world; USA from A to Y, and Ivan Petrovich is Dead, a collection of essays published over the last ten years. In Russia Genis is widely popular as a presenter of the daily cultural program on Radio Liberty, "Above the Barriers" as well as a prolific contributor to leading literary journals. All of his books are "intellectual bestsellers."