The Literate One is Mikhail Iossel’s first book since becoming a permanent resident of Canada. A collection of short stories, Iossel’s work is articulate, culturally engaged and wickedly intelligent. From a peculiar tale of a savant speller, to an eloquent rant about Sully Prudhomme, to a beautifully digressive elegy for his own father, Iossel at once illuminates and challenges the reader with his unique and expertly rendered syntax. These texts are wise and playful, and at times reminiscent of his early adult years in Leningrad where he was a seminal figure in the Samizdat underground literary scene.

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is the author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling. Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

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