Red Shifting

Through this English-language gathering of verse and prose, readers encounter Alexander Skidan, a St. Petersburg writer tied to the avant-garde. It is the most substantial selection of his work yet published in English. Genya Turovskaya and Eugene Ostashevsky, both award-winning poets and translators, rendered the texts.

Skidan was born in 1965 and still lives in St. Petersburg. He has published several volumes of poetry and essays, and he has sat on the selection committee for the Andrei Bely Prize. His book A Critical Mass was put forward for the Small Booker Prize in 1997. The following year he received the Turgenev Award for prose, and in 1994 he took part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.