Longtime professor of literature and creative writing at Vassar, Paul Russell crafts novels that explore the changing identities of characters, gay and straight, chasing love, illusions of success, and meaningful relationships. Several of Russell’s novels are set in the Hudson Valley; his first, The Salt Point, in desolate downtown Po-town; his most recent, War Against the Animals, explores with a delicate brutality the intersecting lives of an aging gay man in Ulster County and the vibrant young punks hired to do his yardwork, and is perhaps my favorite of his books.
Russell recently finished revisions to a new novel, tentatively titled My Unreal Life: Memoirs of Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokoff. The book follows Sergey, Vladimir Nabokov’s brother, from his childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia to Paris in the twenties and thirties to Berlin during the Second World War. A forgotten gay man, barely mentioned by his famous sibling, Sergey was the black sheep of his family and died in a concentration camp in 1945.
[ ... ]
Russell recently finished revisions to a new novel, tentatively titled My Unreal Life: Memoirs of Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokoff. The book follows Sergey, Vladimir Nabokov’s brother, from his childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia to Paris in the twenties and thirties to Berlin during the Second World War. A forgotten gay man, barely mentioned by his famous sibling, Sergey was the black sheep of his family and died in a concentration camp in 1945.
[ ... ]