The Red Passport
Interactive TourThe eight unpredictable, poignant, and often comic stories that make up Katherine Shonk's The Red Passport portray the tumult, hopes, and disappointments of Russians and visiting Americans alike in post-Communist Russia. Many of the Russians in these stories are strangers in their own country, learning to navigate a new landscape of Dunkin Donuts franchises that flourish where consumer culture had so recently been anathema; where the fall of the Soviet Union has not in fact brought about peace or prosperity; and where people still find a way to reach out and for love, despite often disastrous results. "My Mother's Garden" reads like a parable of broken promises--an old woman living near Chernobyl does not understand why she can't eat those robust, lovely, enormous onions, better than any she'd grown for decades. "Our American" is set in Moscow and tells the story of a thirteen year old boy who watches with fascination and dread as his older brother, a veteran of the Chechen war, pursues the naïve American girl next door. "The Young People of Moscow" describes an extraordinary day in the life of an aging Russian couple selling Soviet poetry in an underground bazaar. In her elegantly crafted stories Shonk delves deeply into these people, finding both the nub of their disappointment and the truth of their good intentions. Describing a place that is at once exotic and disconcertingly familiar, The Red Passport is a moving and startling book that doles out amazement and delight in equal measure. |
©Darris Lee Katherine Shonk was born in Chicago and raised in Evanston , Illinois. She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied psychology and began writing short stories. After graduating in 1990, Shonk worked as a secretary and an editor in the Chicago area for a number of years and studied writing with Fred Shafer of Northwestern University. In late 1995, she took an opportunity to move to Russia , and lived and worked in Moscow for a year. Back in the States, Shonk entered the M.A. program in creative writing at the University of Texas and began writing stories set in Russia Shonk's story collection, The Red Passport, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, StoryQuarterly, The Georgia Review, Cicada, Best American Short Stories 2001, and elsewhere. She has received an award and a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, and The Red Passport was a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors 2003 book award for fiction. Since 1999, Shonk has lived in Evanston and worked long-distance as an editor and researcher for Harvard Business School. She is currently writing a novel that is not set in Russia. |
