Stephan Eirik Clark

Made my profile picture on Facebook the cover of my new book: Check. Resisted the urge to send out a mass-email to everyone in my address book, announcing the availability of my new book: Check. Visited Amazon daily, then twice daily, then hourly, to check my sales ranking: Checkcheckcheckcheck. What else am I missing? Oh yes, the book trailer. Let’s check that off:

My blogging abilities have diminished. Maybe five months ago, I meant to write something about Reed College — bye-bye, my soggy friend, I’ll miss you — and then, not long after, I meant to say a thing or two about Augsburg — hello, my snowy friend, I’m so happy you’d have me — but now even this sentiment has grown dated, as my first semester at the college is drawing to a close. More recently, I meant to post the final three blurbs collected for my forthcoming short story collection, Vladimir’s Mustache. But again, and again, and again, I did anything. Have I been thinking I’d get noticed and given a position with the SEC? The Justice Department? I can’t say, but I can try to make up for it. So here, all at once, a blurbapalooza:

From Jodee Stanley, the editor of Ninth Letter and first to publish my collection’s title story:

Stephan Clark’s stories span centuries and social classes, exploring Russian history in heartbreaking, breathtaking detail. Each tale in this marvelous collection combines an Old World gravitas with a contemporary edge, giving us characters that resonate as completely of their time, yet as familiar as our own friends and neighbors. You will find yourself lost, totally immersed in these stories – an experience you don’t want to miss.

From Ben Fountain, whose Brief Encounters with Che Guevara I loved:

Stephan Clark’s very fine story collection is a tour de force of historical imagination. Clark clearly knows the territory, and he brings it to life with an inventiveness and artistry that few writers can match. These wry, wonderful, often revelatory stories mark the debut of a truly gifted writer, and I look forward to reading more books by Stephan Clark.

And finally, from TC Boyle, boss of bosses and author of so many great story collections:

Elegant, classic stories that sift through history and paint a luminous portrait of an enduring cast of Russian characters. Clark is marvelously protean here, engaging multiple personalities and points of view, and his cold eye and ready wit shine through brilliantly.

My thanks to you all.

Introducing, Vladimir’s Mustache.

A webpage for the collection went up on Wednesday, complete with a blurb — the book’s first — from Brett Finlayson, who, along with Alexander Yates, helped make the collection’s longest story, The Castrato of St. Petersburg, much better prior to its being published in Salt Hill.

In addition to thanking Brett, I have to give a few words of appreciation to Sergey Maximishin, without whom I wouldn’t have this book cover. His photo shows a file of photographs of people executed during Stalin’s purges and is part of a longer photo story on Stalin that can be found here.

I considered a good number of images (and one illustration) for the cover, but nothing felt right, nothing separated itself from everything else, until I was directed to Sergey’s work by Carolyn Drake, whose photography is no less worthy of your attention.

I love how Sergey’s photo straddles two time periods, both the past and the present, and how, like a half-opened door in a horror film, it holds back as much as it reveals, making the viewer sit up higher in his chair, or lean off to one side, as if for a better view. It’s just great storytelling, really, and I’m so grateful that I was able to play a role in selecting it — which is one of the joys of publishing with a small press like Russian Life Books.

Now onto the galleys, which I suppose are a month or two away.

It’s a little after ten a.m. at Portland International Airport, I’ve had my shoes scanned and remembered to put my belt back on, and now I’m on the other side of security, waiting for my flight to LA to board. I’m not the only one going to MLA: I saw a professor of Spanish cursing, in Spanish, at the self-check terminal earlier this morning.

I had an hour to kill before my flight, so I did what all Americans do: looked for a way to spend a few dollars. Powell’s had an outpost just down from my gate, so I stepped in there and browsed the sales table. It was there that I found a discounted Best American Essays 2009.

But I should back up a minute. Last year, back when I was still in Russia, I learned from Jodee Stanley, the editor of Ninth Letter, that an essay of mine, “My Year of European Underwear,” which ran in Vol. 4, No. 1 of Ninth Letter, had been named a “notable work” in Best American Essays 2010.

Good news, right? Especially as this was the first time I’d been so named. Well, when the anthology came out last fall, I flipped to the back and saw it was my ghostly double who had in fact been recognized for the first time: Stephen Clark. Same story, same magazine. But the author of this piece was Stephen, not Stephan Clark.

Been happening all of my life, so I should’ve been prepared for it. But I still couldn’t stop looking at it. C.J. Chivers, they got that right. Billy Collins and Ted Conover, yes. They even nailed Sandra Cisneros. But that other guy . . .

So this is what recognition feels like? Needless to say, I didn’t buy a copy of the anthology.

But now cut to today, the PDX Powell’s, and there I am flipping through the back pages of the 2009 edition of this same anthology, looking to see who I should be jealous of, and who do I find but Stephan Clark? For his essay “The Reno Hotel,” which ran in Salt Hill.

I suppose in another world, Stephen Clark is very depressed. In this one, I bought a book.

A friend of mine recently wrote me an email to apologize for the long silence between us, catch me up on her latest travels, and inform me, oh by the way, at the end of a long paragraph, that she was pregnant. “You buried the lead!” I told her, before proceeding to do the very same thing in my next email to her by announcing that I’d had my collection of short stories, Kamkov the Astronomer and Other Stories, accepted for publication.

Russian Life Books will be the publisher. They’ve only recently begun publishing fiction, primarily Russian literature in translation. In the last year or two, they’ve come out with a translation of the soviet-era classic The Little Golden Calf and Peter Aleshkovsky’s Fish: A History of One Migration, which was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize.

Russian Life is an offshoot of the magazine of the same name, which itself dates back, through a couple of different incarnations, to Soviet Life magazine, a periodical first released in 1956 under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union (a similar magazine, Amerika, was published at the same time, under American sponsorship, and distributed in the Soviet Union).

More to come in the run-up to the book’s release, which is scheduled for next winter.