Lara Vapnyar (born 1975) is a Russian-American writer currently living in the United States. She studied comparative literature at

CUNY The City University of New York (CUNY, pronounced , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven ...

and worked with

André Aciman André Aciman (; born 2 January 1951) is an Italian-American writer. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, he is currently a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he teaches the history of lit ...

and

Louis Menand Louis Menand (; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book '' The Metaphysical Club'' (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America. Life ...

. Vapnyar has published four novels and two collections of short stories. Her work has also appeared in

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...

Harper’s Magazine ''Harper's Magazine'' is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts. Launched in New York City in June 1850, it is the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. ''Harper's Magazine'' has ...

, ''Open City'' (magazine), and Zoetrope: All Story.

Life

Vapnyar spent the first 19 years of her life in

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

, where she earned a degree in Russian Language and Literature. Her mother was a professor of math education. In 1998, pregnant, she moved to the United States and later settled on

Staten Island Staten Island ( ) is the southernmost of the boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Richmond County and situated at the southernmost point of New York (state), New York. The borough is separated from the ad ...

with her husband. Though Vapnyar's husband and relatives found employment in the U.S. relatively easily, Vapnyar was unable to find a job. Feeling lonely and alienated, Vapnyar began to write stories in English. She was first published in 2002. In 2011 Vapnyar received a Guggenheim Fellowship. ] and serves as a creative writing professor at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

Work

Vapnyar has been consistently associated by critics with an emerging group of young, Russian-American authors who, in addition to writing exclusively in English, share a “preoccupation with questions of cultural identity, adaptation and assimilation, and nostalgia." Along with Vapnyar, this group includes writers such as David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Olga Grushin, Irina Reyn,

Maxim D. Shrayer Maxim D. Shrayer (; born June 5, 1967, Moscow, USSR) is a bilingual Russian-American author, translator, and literary scholar, and a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Biography Shrayer was born and grew up in M ...

, Anya Ulinich,

Gary Shteyngart Gary Shteyngart ( ; born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart on July 5, 1972)' is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of five novels (including ''Absurdistan'' and '' Super Sad True Love Story'') and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical ...

and others, all of whom immigrated to the United States and Canada from the former USSR as children or young people. Because of their shared interest in articulating the immigrant experience in a nonnative language, Vapnyar and her literary cohorts are frequently called “translingual,” and explore “what it means to be a Russian writer with a hyphen." Thus, the trend for recent Russian-American authors is not to depict “immigrants on their way to ultimate assimilation… ut insteadto present themselves as partially alienated strangers” for a distinctly American audience. On the one hand, authors have “addressed the pitfalls of writing about one's country of origin for a foreign audience." For example, in “The Writer as Tour Guide,” Vapnyar “reports that a reader, who was himself a Russian immigrant, told her that her books made him uncomfortable because they were so obviously written with an American audience in mind." On the other hand, depicting “North American contexts from the perspective of a Russian newcomer” allows the authors to effectively communicate the alienating experience of immigration and to help them establish their own translingual, transcultural identities. This last point, that the act of creative writing is cathartic and formative, is especially true for Vapnyar, who has wondered (in interviews) whether she would have learned to feel at ease in the United States without writing fiction in English. For Vapnyar, creative writing is her primary “means of establishing her identity in her adopted homeland." Vapnyar’s reliance on creative writing as a means to form her own identity is reflected in her frequent use of a trope—common to all the Fourth Wave writers—that has been defined as the “self-portrait of the author as a translingual and transcultural storyteller." This trope is essentially an act of parody, where novels and short stories produced by the group present protagonists that are authors or storytellers themselves, spending the majority of the narratives explaining their Soviet lives to American characters. In doing so, Vapnyar is able to “symbolically enact... erown role as a self-exoticising translingual writer who presents her culture of origin to an audience of American readers.” Three of Vapnyar's books have appeared in

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

, although she did not participate in their translation.

Bibliography

Novels

* *2014: ''The Scent of Pine: A Novel'' (Simon & Schuster) *2016: ''Still Here: A Novel'' (Hogarth) *2019: ''Divide Me By Zero: A Novel'' (Tin House Books)

Short fiction

;Collections *2003: ''There Are Jews in My House'' (Anchor) *2008: ''Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love'' (Anchor) ;StoriesShort stories unless otherwise noted.

Nonfiction

*2008: “The Writer as Tour Guide” in ''The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature'', edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Indiana University Press): 92-105 ————— ;Notes