Volume 54, Number 20 · December 20, 2007
From the Other Shore
By Elaine Blair
The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories
by Ellen Litman
Norton, 236 pp., $23.95
Alyosha Kamyshinskiy came to Pittsburgh from Leningrad some years ago with his wife, two teenage daughters, an advanced degree, and a love of art museums and 'gentle poetry' ('a sleigh, a moonlit trail, the melancholy trot of a troika'). In America he put together a fragile life for the family that has since fallen apart: his daughters—one of whom dropped out of college—don't bother to look for jobs, his wife has died of cancer, and his boss has fired him. He pays the rent with welfare checks and dreams of moving to Chicago to live with his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend (a former classmate of his older daughter).
Review, 2653 words
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