Red Hen Press and Fictional Cafe celebrate today the publication of Spring in Siberia, the first novel by a young writer named Artem Mozgovoy. Born in Central Siberia, he finds solace in the literature he reads and begins to write. Spring in Siberia is his coming of age story, told in fiction.
This excerpt is from Chapter 16. An interview with Kate Gale, Managing Editor
and Executive Director at Red Hen Press, follows it.
‘I’m afraid that I love you,’ my classmate spoke quickly and quietly, but I managed to catch his words before they melted in the evening smoke.
We were standing on the sixteenth-story balcony, on the top floor of the tallest building in our city. Neither he nor I lived in that block, but we knew that each level gave access to a public deck overlooking the vast provincial drabness in which we did live. First, we would stand by the locked door downstairs, waiting for some resident with a key; we’d tell that someone that we wished to visit Masha, or Sasha, or Dasha, or some other non existent friend, and hopefully be let in; then we’d ride the doddery, stinking elevator to the top, walk through a dark corridor and, after pushing open a rusty, creaky door, at last reach that secret place of our own.