{"title":"Alta Ifland","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"wife-who-wasn-t-book-alta-ifland-9781734537918","title":"The Wife Who Wasn't","description":"“This comedy of errors is a page-turner, where a mail-order bride service, enough love triangles to boggle the mind, a stolen Egon Schiele painting, and a devastating fire lead the worlds of Santa Barbara and Chișinău to collide.”  —Los Angeles Review of Books  An exhilaratingly comical, crosscultural debut novel, The Wife Who Wasn’t brings together an eccentric community from the hills of Santa Barbara, California, and a family of Russians from Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. It starts in the late 1990s, after the fall of communism, and has at its center the mail-order marriage between a California man (Sammy) and a Russian woman (Tania) who comes to America, which engenders a series of hilarious cultural misunderstandings.  The novel’s four parts take place alternately in California and Moldova, and comprise short chapters whose point of view moves seamlessly between that of the omniscient narrator and that of various characters. Delivered in arresting prose, both realities—late 90s, bohemian\/hipster California and postcommunist Moldova—thus come together from opposite points of view.  Above all, this novel is a comedy of manners that depicts the cultural (and personality) clash between Tania and Sammy, Anna (Sammy’s teenage daughter) and Irina, and Bill (Sammy’s neighbor) and Serioja (Tania’s brother). It is also a comedy of errors in the tradition of playful, multiple love triangles. The novel reaches a shocking climax involving a stolen Egon Schiele painting and alluding to the real history of East Mountain Drive, whose bohemian community was destroyed in the 2008 “Tea Fire.”  A literary tour de force and a rollicking satire of both suburban America and urban Eastern Europe,  is a must for fans of Gary Schteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook), Keith Gessen (A Terrible Country), Ludmila Ulitskaya (), and Lara Vapnyar (Divide Me By Zero).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50150427623697,"sku":"GOR013871840","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50217415147793,"sku":"CIN1734537914G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51049983639825,"sku":"NIN9781734537918","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52473963544849,"sku":"NLS9781734537918","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1734537914.jpg?v=1750766061"},{"product_id":"voice-of-ice-voix-de-glace-book-alta-ifland-9781934254035","title":"Voice of Ice\/Voix de Glace","description":"Poetry. Translated from the French by the author. VOICE OF ICE is prose poetry presented in a bilingual edition. Written in French and translated by the author into the English, these poems were generated in a process yielding concurrent shifts to the original. Poet Wanda Coleman says: In transplanting her painterly European sensibility into an American poetic context, Alta Ifland creates and redreams the hauntingly surreal emotional landscapes of dislocation, desolate distances, and Redonesque disjuncture from which she shapes these ever-shifting, mad-and-mythic excursions--in voices angry, awed, childlike, sardonic, she startles and disturbs, charms and exalts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVOICE OF ICE is published as part of the TrenchArt Parapet series, with an introduction by Gary Young and visual art by Danielle Adair.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50827586928913,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50827588043025,"sku":"CIN1934254037G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1934254037.jpg?v=1751315056"},{"product_id":"speaking-to-no-4-book-alta-ifland-9781734537970","title":"Speaking to No. 4","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom America to France and Eastern Europe to Japan, this quest for a woman who has disappeared is a psychological mystery and an architectural odyssey in one. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eWhere is Alma? A future husband--No. 4--is desperately seeking his fianc e, who has disappeared. To locate her, he is interviewing her three former husbands, her sister, and ex sister-in-law. Could she be hiding in a French monastery? A Japanese shukubo (temple lodging)? Or maybe she is the victim of a belief in a Balkan creation myth? \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWritten in six voices that come together in a seamless and often comical narrative, \u003ci\u003eSpeaking to No. 4\u003c\/i\u003e is both a psychological mystery and a meditation on our construction of space. As husband No. 3, the Architect, says to husband-to-be No. 4, Think of Japanese space as a novel in which the main character is absent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51048983101713,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51048986870033,"sku":"NIN9781734537970","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52107368628497,"sku":"CIN1734537973G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1734537973.jpg?v=1751216133"},{"product_id":"elegie-pour-un-monde-fabuleux-book-alta-ifland-9782488110167","title":"Elégie pour un monde fabuleux","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53648913006865,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53648913137937,"sku":"NLS9782488110167","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]},{"product_id":"two-queens-and-a-chronicler-book-alta-ifland-9798991799041","title":"Two Queens and a Chronicler","description":"\u003cp\u003eTwo Queens and a Chronicler is an atypical historical novel inspired by the lives of Romania's queens, Elisabeta (1843-1916) and Marie (1875-1938). Written entirely as a dialogue between three women-the two queens and their chronicler, a contemporary Romanian-born American writer-the novel enacts a conversation between the past and the present during which the queens reflect on events both from their era and our time, politics, the two great wars, love, art, beauty, life, death, and other royals, including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. One of them originally from Germany and the other from Great Britain, a granddaughter to Queen Victoria, the two queens share something with their chronicler: they are immigrant female writers. Their ongoing conversation offers the bits and pieces of a fascinating puzzle.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53667620389137,"sku":"NIN9798991799041","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798991799041.jpg?v=1781470213"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-alta-ifland.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}