Sentence is a groundbreaking collection of one-sentence stories in a dizzying spin of memory, imagination and virtuosity.
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Literary LitStackers, listen up! Another beauty is in presale now. Linda Leith Publishing invites readers on a journey into Sentence, a new book by Mikhail Iossel. Early indications suggest a work of profound literary exploration. Though details remain carefully guarded, the publisher’s evocative description and the cover art hint at a reading experience sure to resonate with discerning readers. Here’s the advance reader word on the book. Consider Sentence a literary must own and pre-order today.
In This Spotlight On Sentence
About Sentence
In Sentence, Mikhail Iossel performs a remarkable juggling act between genres and countries. Can you write a “Russian” sentence in English? The author has found a perfect syntactical solution to the opposition of past and present in this groundbreaking collection of one-sentence stories: everything is simultaneous, breathless, in a dizzying spin of memory and imagination. The past and the present are inseparable-but the sentence is here, as a celebration of linguistic freedom and virtuosity.
Praise for Sentence
Mikhail Iossel is one of our greatest contemporary writers. He carries the torch of Russian literary genius, writing with brilliance of the snake pit of Soviet Communism. His gift for characterization, vivid imagery and absurdity makes his work mesmerizing. His writing is unforgettable.—David Evanier, author of Red Love
Sentence is a brilliant and breathless literary manifestation of speed that made me think of Gogol and the prose of Blaise Cendrars in his fictional trip on the Trans-Siberian express. Here, a brooding Russian Jew vividly recalls his Soviet childhood in a cramped communal apartment and the subsequent many losses he has experienced, ones that flash by like the view through the window of a fast train. Iossel’s narrator is moving and melancholy, insightful and aphoristic and unlike anyone else you are likely to read in contemporary writing.—Antanas Sileika, author of The Death of Tony
Mikhail Iossel has created a genre of his own—a mix of memoir, speculative fiction, philosophical reflection–and a flavoured language distinctly his, highly lyrical and melodic; Iossel is a sort of linguistic Paganini, delivering capriccios with a playful joy, and occasionally he decelerates in a melancholy way as he nostalgically reminisces about the passage of time, death, and his former life in the Soviet Union.—Josip Novakovich, author of Rubble of Rubles
“What distinguishes Iossel as a writer, aside from his obvious talent for atmospheric dramedy, is his lucid, musical prose style… Iossel’s marvelous sense of rhythm dazzles the reader. We can?t stop turning the pages of this book.”―New York Times Book Review
“The former USSR continues to cast a long shadow on our current affairs, but Mikhail Iossel brings a fresh eye to the region. . . . Engaging equally with the absurdity and brutality of life in a repressive regime, [Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is] perfect for fans of Gogol and George Saunders alike.”―Chicago Review of Book
“Very funny. . . In Love like Water, Love like Fire, jokes point to the absurdities and logical contradictions in everyday life. . . . There is something refreshing about Iossel’s willingness to maintain his sense of irony, even about such intractable subjects as anti-Semitism, the ghastliness of Soviet bureaucracy, or the irreconcilability of death with human happiness.”―Literary Review of Canada
“Iossel is an exception among the writers of his generation. . . . Full of subtle irony and macabre humor, his prose makes such skillful use of American colloquialism that it is as though these stories take place in some fictional Soviet-America.”―TLS
“[Iossel’s] lens is honest and compassionate. If there’s one takeaway from Love Like Water, Love Like Fire, it’s that this compassion may be necessary today more than ever.”―Winnipeg Free Press
“Brilliant. . . . [Iossel] has created a style that is as intriguing and richly suggestive as that of his predecessor, Vladimir Nabokov.”―Canberra Times
“An expertly written set of stories, often brimming with dark humor, offering many vantage points from which to consider the Soviet experience, and the particular burdens it placed on Jews.”―J. The Jewish News of Northern California
“Iossel brings his warm, gently ironic authorial voice to bear on the cruel and often surreal lives of Jews in the Soviet Union. . . . ‘There is love like fire, and there is love like water,’ say the Hasidic masters, and Iossel’s collection explores that dichotomy.”―Jewish Book Council
“[A] vibrant collection. . . . With an ear for the clumsiness of Russian bureaucratic nomenclature, an eye for Kafkaesque humiliations, and a heart that embraces all the paradoxes of being a Soviet Jew, Iossel casts a spell over the reader. Reading like Sholem Aleichem updated by Bruce Jay Friedman, these stories reflect the exciting evolution of Russian Jewish literature.”―Publishers Weekly
“[An] engaging collection. . . . While many stories illuminate the absurdity of Soviet society, Iossel conveys the brutal oppression of the surveillance state most intensely, and hauntingly, in the title story.”―Kirkus Reviews
“Harrowing, hilarious, dark, and devastating. . . Iossel’s sentences twist the reader through the illogical forces of dictatorship, childhood, puberty, survival, and writing angsty poetry in a communist regime.”―Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize jury citation
About Mikhail Iossel, Author of Sentence
Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986.
He is the author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling.
Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.
A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.
Sources: Publisher, Amazon
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
ISBN: 9781773901749
Pub Date: Aug 1, 2025
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