Last week I finished reading Moscow But Dreaming by Ekaterina Sedia. Simply put, Sedia and Karin Tidbeck have changed my attitude toward short stories. Prior to reading Jagannath and Moscow But Dreaming, I turned up my nose at the form, an attitude that originated, I suspect, during an American lit class in which I was enrolled as a college frosh. "But the scorched grasshoppers in Hemingway's story are symbolic of World War I veterans, you see..." No. I didn't see it. And I wrote in my blue book until my hand cramped. It still aches before rain.

But Tidbeck and Sedia have made me believers. I ignore my previous errors and instead advocate on their behalf with the zeal of the newly converted. Tidbeck and Sedia, you see, are practitioners of the "new weird," a genre with which I'm entranced and is, I suspect, best suited by the medium of the short story.

Moscow But Dreaming opens with "A Short Encyclopedia of the Lunar Seas," a dreamy travelogue in which the moon's "seas" are described, including both their particular qualities and the behavior of their natives. Sedia lets you know that you may check reality at the door and prepare to encounter the fantastic.

Sedia's subsequent stories are less experimental but no less powerful. In the masterful "The Bank of Burkina Faso," Sedia uses as inspiration the e-mail scams to which readers have all grown accustomed, finding in them kernels of economic and spiritual truths. "One, Two, Three" draws on Eastern European folklore and brilliantly sets the stage for its events while avoiding predictability. I was charmed by "Chapaev and the Coconut Girl," about a Russian expat's efforts to construct artificial intelligence based on a Bolshevik war hero and a Polynesian myth.

Myth, folklore, and history figure prominently in Sedia's writing. As might be expected, given the book's title, Russia is the focus of many of the book's stories. In "Tin Cans," an elderly man confronts the ghosts of Russia's Soviet past. My personal favorite, and the one that ends the book, is "A Handsome Fellow," about a romance that takes place during the siege of Leningrad. This story, too, avoids going where the reader expects.

Moscow But Dreaming is a wonderful collection of the weird and fantastic. Sedia's stories are dark and surprising. The influence of Russian (and world) folklore is welcome and is well integrated into the stories. Highly recommended. ( )

Come suggerisce il titolo questi racconti sono tutti ambientati in quello spazio che divide la realtà dal sogno, dal mito, dall'aldilà.
Tutti i racconti contengono un elemento fantastico che, oltre a affascinare, aiuta i personaggi nell'acquistare consapevolezza di cosa sono e di cosa vorrebbero essere in realtà e in molti casi è il motore del cambiamento.
Trattano temi impegnativi come la consapevolezza di non appartenere al tempo e al luogo in cui si vive e per questo sono pervasi da malinconia.
Ogni racconto avvolge il lettore impedendogli di pensare ad altro, così come dovrebbe fare ogni buon libro.

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As the title suggests, these stories are set in the space dividing reality from dream, from myth and from afterlife.
Each story contains a fascinating fantastic element that helps the characters in increasing the awareness of who they are and who they want really to be; in some cases this element is the driving force of the change.
The stories are about serious themes like the understanding of not belonging to the time and place one's living and for this reason they are full of melancholy.
Each story ties the reader preventing any other thought, such as every good book should do. ( )

Overall Satisfaction: ★★★
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★
Read this for: The atmosphere
Don't read this for: The themes
Bechdel Test: 3 out of 21 stories pass
Johnson Test: 3 out of 21 stories pass
Books I was reminded of: Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales and Deathless; Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; Shel Silverstine's The Giving Tree; Brandon Sanderson's Elantris.
Will I read more by this author? I'll give at least one of her novels a try.

Despite containing several stories I loved, this collection was a disappointment to me. Sedia is clearly a talented writer, but too many of the stories either took risks that didn't pay off or remained completely opaque to me, even after turning to Google to see if I was missing references. I was also confused by the inclusion of two distinctly non-Russian stories; one is a retelling of a Japanese folktale, the other is a pseudo-African folktale, and both seemed completely out of place in the collection and lacked the depth of history and mythology that Sedia brought to her Russian-set stories. And while Sedia has been lauded as a feminist writer, concerned with the place of women in the world and the power dynamics between women and men, these stories more often than not positioned their female characters as victims. Not agent-less victims, I will grant, and victimized more often by the patriarchal machinery of society as a whole rather than individual men, but still victims. Several of the stories also positioned fatness as grotesque and malignant, and there were hints of cultural appropriation, ableism, and classism that made me uncomfortable.

Still, when Sedia was writing in what appears to be her comfort zone, magical realist and fairy tale influenced stories set either in modern-day Russia or among Russian immigrants elsewhere in the world, she was quite impressive. "Citizen Komorova Finds Love," "Tin Cans," and "You Dream" were all incredibly evocative, packing both significant thematic and emotional punches into not very many pages. None of these three are happy stories -- actually none of the stories in the entire collection is happy -- but they resonate the way short fiction ought, illuminating little corners of much larger worlds.

Descriptions and reviews of each story on my blog. ( )

Moscow But Dreaming is a collection of Ekaterina Sedia's short stories. Most of the stories were previously published in various magazines and anthologies and two are original to the collection. I hadn't read any of the stories before, though I have read Sedia's novel The Secret History of Moscow, which I quite liked. Several of the stories in the collection are in a similar vein.

Moscow But Dreaming contains twenty-one short stories, with an average length of about thirteen pages — on the shorter side, with nothing approaching novella length.

I would class the stories included in Moscow But Dreaming into three rough categories: stories set in Russia or the Soviet Union, non-Western fairy tales, and stories with more present-day Western settings. Of course there is some overlap, particularly if you feel foreignly about Russian fairy tales (which I don't). In general, my favourite were the Russian-flavoured stories; they resonated most with me and, as someone who grew up as much with Russian folklore as with Disneyfied Grimm and Andersen, felt both familiar and rare. Many of Sedia's stories are about mundane tragedies, everyday difficulties of lives that have rarely been easy. The result is generally sad tales of lives made better or worse by small magic. Or big magic, out of the main character's control, as a means of escape.

Some stories that stood out were "Citizen Komarova Finds Love", which started off unsurprisingly, but then took a surprisingly gruesome turn and, like many of Sedia's stories, ended sadly, as it also began. "You Dream" is written in a more unusual style — second person — and is a story where now, long after reading it, the Muscovite setting stands out most strongly. "The Bank of Burkina Faso" was one of my favourite stories and one of the few to have a happy ending (not that most of it wasn't sad). It didn't take me where I expected to go and it even featured the Moscow subway dogs (wiki, although google for more exciting news story renditions). I liked the idea in "By the Litre", of being able to imbibe souls and not have it be something terrible and evil. The main characters aren't monsters, they just stumbled upon a way to remember other people's memories and what's wrong with that, if the alternative is nothing?

"Chapev and the Coconut Girl" was about an AI scientist from Lithuania working at MIT. I enjoyed the description of her being other (foreign) and lacking a shared cultural history with those around her. I think this was one of the longer stories, so there was plenty of space for the character to develop. The way she romanticises both Chapaev — a hero of the Red Army — and a folk tale from her mother's travels to Bali was fascinating. Both figures were well outside her time and experience and yet she made up elaborate back stories (or front stories in the case of Chapaev who she fantasised didn't die as presumed) while refusing to get to know many of the people around her. She was one of my favourite characters to appear in this collection.

"There is a Monster Under Helen's Bed" and "A Play for a Boy and Sock Puppets" are both set in the US and feature troubled children. Helen's story, told in part from her adoptive mother's point of view, was tragic in a no-win way and the ending wasn't what I was expecting. The play, although not strictly a play per se, was told from the sock puppet's point of view and was very touching.

Of the non-Western fairytale type stories, my favourites were "Munashe and the Spirits", an African morality tale with overt magic but beginning and ending in the contemporary real world. And, although it had a moral, I hasten to add that it wasn't preachy. And "The Taste of Wheat" in which the fantastical element was a bit uncomfortable — rats turning into babies — but the narcoleptic main character seeing Buddha in her dreams appealed to me.

I also really enjoyed the last story, "A Handsome Fellow". Although I read it most recently and hence it's difficult to gauge how memorable it will be, I have a feeling the final scene will stay with me. A teenage or young adult girl working to keep her mother and young brothers alive during the Siege of Leningrad (WWII).

My least favourite part of the collection was the introduction by Jeffrey Ford. I didn't read it in full when I started the collection because I got bored and wanted to get to the stories (happens with most introductions for me). Reading it afterwards, it rather annoyed me. I suggest skipping it altogether. But then, I don't entirely get introductions to collections. I'd much rather read about what the author thinks of the stories or how it came into being (blame Asimov for that).

In my recent review of Cracklescape, I compared Margo Lanagan to Sedia. It's only fair that I now point out that if you're a fan of Lanagan, giving Sedia a go would be a good move. I strongly recommend this collection to people looking for fantasy stories that are a bit off the beaten path. I've no doubt that the fairy tales will seem exotic to many readers. Anyone with a passing interest in Russia or the Soviet Union will probably find something to like in Moscow But Dreaming. Fans of sad stories (of which I sometimes think there aren't enough in the fantasy genre) will enjoy this collection. If you enjoyed the setting and vibe of The Secret History of Moscow, I strongly recommend this collection.

5 / 5 stars

A side note: it was hard to choose a rating for this; I didn't love every but I loved enough of them to rate it up (and I wanted to put it on my favourite books side panel, which is what 5 star ratings are all about).

A review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley.

You can read more of my reviews on my blog. ( )