Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories with Maxim Osipov

On Monday September 23 at 7pm, Maxim Osipov will make a rare appearance in the U.S. to give a reading as part of the Hopscotch Translation Series at the Penn Book Center in Philadelphia, which is being co-sponsored by The University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College. Open to the public. Details below:

 

Hopscotch Translation Series: Maxim Osipov's ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

 

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS is the first English-language collection of this contemporary Russian master of the short story!

 

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia’s best contemporary writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to write stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Osipov’s fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of life in provincial Russia—its tragedies, frustrations, and moments of humble beauty and inspiration. The twelve stories in this volume depict doctors, actors, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses, and common criminals whose paths intersect in unpredictable yet entirely natural ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices and on trains and in planes. Their encounters lead to disasters, major and minor epiphanies, and—on occasion—the promise of redemption.

 

MAXIM OSIPOV is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, he established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published five collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Tarusa. In May 2019, Dr. Osipov was profiled in The New Yorker in a “Life and Letters” piece titled “A Village Doctor’s Literary Calling.”

 

JON STONE is Associate Professor of Russian and Russian Studies and Chair of the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages at Franklin & Marshall College. He studies early Russian modernism, European Decadence, and the print and material culture of the fin de siècle. He is the author of The Historical Dictionary of Russian Literature (Scarecrow Press, 2013) and The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (Northwestern University Press, 2017). He has published articles on Russian Symbolism, Decadence, the history of the book, and Mikhail Bakhtin in the PMLA, Russian Review, Modernism/Modernity, and SEEJ. His book Decadence and Modernism at the Fin-de-siècle is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.