{"product_id":"steppe-isbn-9781646223077","title":"Steppe","description":"\u003cb\u003eA visceral, stirring novel following a queer literature student traveling across Russia with her estranged father, a long haul truck driver secretly dying of AIDS, from the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003eWound\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA decade after her father walks out on her family, the narrator of \u003ci\u003eSteppe\u003c\/i\u003e, now a literature student, goes on the road with him as he makes deliveries across the vast plains of Russia. She’s both drawn to and repulsed by his rugged life as a trucker, eager to understand the person who made her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the prematurely aged, embittered man secretly being consumed by AIDS who meets her at the train station has little revelation to offer her yearning heart. As he drives her across desolate landscapes in his freight truck, the narrator tugs on the few threads that make him her family, and reflects on her father’s small role in Russia’s violent patriarchal structure and the chaos and depravity of the post-Soviet 1990s. Always humming in the background, the austere beauty and mercurial nature of the steppe reminds her of the contradictions at the heart of their relationship—both natural and forced, intimate and alienated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOksana Vasyakina’s second novel pierces the surface of human relations and reaches into the depths of shame, longing, and grief that lie beneath. In simple, precise prose, she paints a vivid portrait of estrangement and situates it in the broader context of her country’s attempts to reckon with its troubled history.\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAutostraddle\u003c\/i\u003e, A Most Anticipated Queer Book of the Month\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLGBTQ Reads\u003c\/i\u003e, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A clarifying portrait of post-Soviet Russian life, cycles of violence, and the ways that ideological training can seamlessly shift into behavior more suited for a criminal underworld. The more specific this narrative gets, the more searing its emotional connections become.\" —Tobias Carroll, \u003ci\u003eWords Without Borders\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Searing . . . Vasyakina brings an astute, lyrical eye to the time that father and daughter spend together, much of it on the road . . . The novel takes a piercing look at what is typically ignored—the barren landscape of the steppe, working-class lives, and the shape of suffering of someone who refuses to treat his illness . . . \u003ci\u003eSteppe\u003c\/i\u003e is a poetic illumination of those who don’t stop being and those who don’t stop mattering, an ode to the harsh beauty of its titular landscape.\" —Anna Mebel, \u003ci\u003eAsymptote\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Short but haunting . . . [\u003ci\u003eSteppe\u003c\/i\u003e] is part of a trilogy investigating the deaths of members of Vasyakina’s family. But it is also a portrait of a certain class of Russians, and by extension the history of Russia itself . . . [An] intensely observant book.\" —Andrew Holleran, \u003ci\u003eThe Gay \u0026amp; Lesbian Review Worldwide\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An elegiac tribute to a fatally flawed bond.\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In this compassionate and clear-eyed character study, Vasyakina traces the bond between a rough-hewn Siberian truck driver and his queer daughter . . . Vasyakina assembles a thoughtful and necessarily incomplete portrait of the father from the narrator’s musings on the harshness and violence of the post-Soviet era that shaped him. It’s a satisfying examination of how well a father and daughter can know one another.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A family history, a road trip through contemporary Russia, \u003ci\u003eSteppe\u003c\/i\u003e is as unflinching and capacious as the landscape from which it takes its name. Vasyakina is a rare truthsayer, a voice of her generation. I loved this.\" —Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of \u003ci\u003eGhost Pains\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"This is a gorgeously recursive book about daughters and fathers, about the unknowability. pain, and occasional tragedy of being fathered in the early twenty-first century, and the way we come to understand our own childhoods only as adults, when it's all too late. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like \u003ci\u003eSteppe\u003c\/i\u003e, and at times when I was reading it felt so real and heartbreaking I could hardly stand it.\" —Madeleine Watts, author of \u003ci\u003eElegy, Southwest\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"In Vasyakina's prose, grief and isolation become luminous. When reading this dissociative and brilliant novel, one is reminded that to have a father is to inherit a fractured nation.\" —Zain Khalid, author of \u003ci\u003eBrother Alive\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eOKSANA VASYAKINA\u003c\/b\u003e is a Russian poet and curator. Her debut poetry collection, \u003ci\u003eWomen’s Prose\u003c\/i\u003e, was short-listed for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2016, and her debut novel, \u003ci\u003eWound, \u003c\/i\u003ewon the NOS Prize in 2021. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e ELINA ALTER\u003c\/b\u003e is a writer and translator. Her work appears in \u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Paris Review, The New England Review\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. She is the editor of \u003ci\u003eCircumference\u003c\/i\u003e, a journal of translation and international culture.","brand":"Catapult","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233583804645,"sku":"NP9781646223077","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781646223077.jpg?v=1767737311","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/steppe-isbn-9781646223077","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}