Reading Right Now - Life and Fate

I generally like to have two books going at any one time, usually one novel and one non-fiction. Right now I'm reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Grossman was a Soviet military journalist during WW II and told his story in A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945, but the fictional Life and Fate is considered his great work. Much of his work was suppressed during his lifetime and the KGB actually seized the draft of this book. It wasn't published until 1960 - and then only in the West from a smuggled manuscript.

Anyway, according to Library Journal, "Grossman uses one family's experiences of the months of the Stalingrad campaign to show the entire mad tapestry woven by Stalin and Hitler." It has been compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace and is also reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914. (What is it with Russian novelists that all of their books have to be like 700 pages long with very dense prose?)

If you enjoy reading, and you must if you're still reading this post, you owe it to yourself to check out the New York Review of Books Classics that "reintroduces some of the many remarkable books that have fallen out of print, or simply out of sight, in recent years."

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/about