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.