What Isn't Remembered: Stories

by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Overview

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn’t Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves—a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner.

A young man longs for his mother’s love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother’s affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong feud between the two. A divorced man struggles to come to terms with his failed marriage and his family’s genocidal past while trying to persuade his father to start cancer treatments. A high school girl feels responsible for the death of her best friend, and the guilt continues to haunt her decades later.

Evocative and lyrical, the tales in What Isn’t Remembered uncover complex events and emotions, as well as the unpredictable ways in which people adapt to what happens in their lives, finding solace from the most surprising and unexpected sources.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496229137
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	09/01/2021
Series:	The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, a Russian Armenian émigré, has published fifty stories and received eight Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Gorcheva-Newberry is the winner of the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Table of Contents

Boys on the Moskva River
All of Me
The Heart of Things
A Lullaby for My Father
Heroes of Our Time
Simple Song #9
Nepenthe 
Beloveds
The Suicide Note
Second Person
Gene Therapy
And What Rough Beast
No Other Love
Pictures of the Snow
Champions of the World
What Isn’t Remembered
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

In Russian Armenian Gorcheva-Newberry’s vibrant collection, a series of immigrants embrace their adopted culture while remaining rootless and shackled to the past. . . . Throughout, the situations are arresting and the images indelible. Gorcheva-Newberry’s luminous prose will remain vivid in the reader’s mind."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
  


“Every reader who treasures powerful, surprising, and memorable short stories will find much to appreciate in this stunning first book.”—Lindsay Harmon, Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher

2021-06-29
A collection of short, melancholy stories focusing on Russian immigrants to the United States.

The short stories in this debut collection chronicle the lives of characters beset by persistent regrets and dissatisfactions. Most of the central figures are Russian, and many have immigrated or are considering immigrating to the United States. Gorcheva-Newberry, herself a Russian émigré, displays a keen understanding of her home country’s cultural particularities in some of her collection’s finest stories: In “Heroes of Our Time,” a teenage boy ventures into Moscow in the spring of 1991 to attempt to recruit a sex worker on behalf of his ailing grandfather only to accidentally find himself entangled with a militant pro-aristocracy group. In “Boys on the Moskva River,” the narrator remembers the life and violent death of his brother, Konstantin, whom their mother preferred and who was involved with organized crime. Gorcheva-Newberry’s prose is clear and can quickly cut to the marrow of a complex emotional experience: In “The Suicide Note,” a Russian immigrant reflects, “I thought how hard it was to make someone laugh in a foreign language. And if you couldn’t laugh together, how could you live together? In that sense America remained a mystery to me.” For all its strengths, however, this collection is a frustrating experience. Gorcheva-Newberry’s skills as a prose stylist do not extend to dialogue, and many of her characters state their feelings in an unrealistically straightforward way. The collection’s weakest stories lack the cultural and psychological specificity of its strongest and detract from the reading experience. “Simple Song #9,” for instance, follows the romance and breakup of archetypal characters named “Boy” and “Girl,” featuring dreary sentences like, “Girl meets Man.” Gorcheva-Newberry is on firmer and more rewarding territory in her more conventional stories.

A mixed effort with some real high points.

Kirkus Reviews