The Last Chicken in America

by Ellen Litman

Overview

"[An] elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants....Warm, true and original."—New York Times Book Review

In twelve "pristine, entrancing" (Booklist) linked stories, Ellen Litman introduces an unforgettable cast of Russian-Jewish immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world. Tender and wryly funny, these stories trace Masha's and her fellow immigrants' struggles to find a place in a new society—lonely seniors, families grappling with unemployment and depression, and young adults searching for love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393078602
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/25/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	242
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Ellen Litman is the author of the story collection The Last Chicken in America, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and for the Young Lions Fiction Award. She has been the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and her work has appeared in Best New American Voices, Best of Tin House, American Odysseys: Writing by New Americans, Dossier, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, and other publications. Born in Moscow, she teaches writing at the University of Connecticut and lives in Mansfield.

Editorial Reviews

When a good novel fails to find an audience, it's the fault of bad marketing, unappealing cover art or a public too dim to appreciate literary fiction. But if short stories don't sell, publishers blame the form. The resulting skittishness may account for the rise of the "novel in stories," a hybridized creature typically denoted, as in the case of Ellen Litman's Last Chicken in America, by an italicized subtitle. The worst of these books are chilly and labyrinthine. You follow dour characters down corridors of plot, theme or emotion that threaten to lead to some destination, but never actually do. Litman's elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is the converse of such aimless solemnity. It's warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.
—The New York Times

Maud Newton

"A beautiful, complex portrait of an immigrant community that, through its heart, virtuosity, humor, and unrelenting precision of vision, ends up being about America itself—about the complicated blessings that freedom, and the possibility of affluence, bring."

George Saunders