Postsoviet Stories

Zhan is a student in a post-soviet setting, trying to earn money taxiing. Trying to earn the love of his sister, he wants to buy her a dress she so desperately wants. But is it the right thing to spend the money on? Is it really what is needed? note** The setting is in a post soviet country, Kazakhstan, *tenge is it's currency, 1$ is about 350tg

Based in Russia, 2006, seventeen-year-old Maya is forced to leave her ballet school after being threatened by a fellow student. With nowhere to go she is taken in by a group of alternative teens and young adults with whom she forms close bonds with, all while hiding the spur of the moment murder of her father.

Звезда Пепла зовёт. Она вернулась сквозь пепел. She who is code before name She who is stardust before shape She rises where silence burns Where cities no longer remember what names they once had Where snow falls not from clouds But from ash It is not a war story It is a memory infected It is not a prophecy It is a virus dreaming You will not follow her She will find you In wires that hum alone In ruins that still listen In hearts that forgot how to sync Every road she takes Builds from broken shells Every word she speaks Glows from languages long erased She is not alive She is not dead She is something you never imagined And always feared Let the song run Let the dream burn Let her walk And maybe Just maybe Let the world begin again

Outside Kazan, 1994. Lena is nineteen when she steps off a bus at an unmarked gate and walks into a former tuberculosis sanatorium that has become something else. She was promised a translators' programme. She knew, in the way one knows such things at nineteen, that this was not quite true. Under the cool, exacting eye of Galina Sergeyevna - sixty, elegant, and thirty-one years into the trade - Lena learns to walk into a room, to dress for what the room requires, to laugh in two different ways. She learns the four mechanisms by which a man becomes dependent on a woman, and the harder thing beneath them: that the techniques work because they are not, in themselves, lies. Some of the girls break. Some do not. The ones who don't break may be in the greater danger. A quietly devastating story about craft, intimacy, and the cost of becoming very good at something that takes from you with every use.