Natasha and other stories

Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before May 2003, when Harper’s, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection. In the space of a few weeks, America thus met the Bermans-Bella and Roman and their son, Mark-Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams. Told through Mark’s eyes, the stories in Natasha possess a serious wit and uniquely Jewish perspective that recall the first published stories of Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, not to mention the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, and Adam Haslett. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, the Toronto Book Award, Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, Koffler Centre of the Arts’ Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Fiction, and the Moment Magazine Fiction Award Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and the Governor General’s Award for Literature, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Best First Collection of Short Fiction in the English Language Named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times’ 1 of the 25 Best Books of the Year, a New York Public Library’s 25 Best Books to Remember, and a Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year