Larissa Shmailo's Blog, page 11
January 11, 2016
Coverage for PATIENT WOMEN in OSM, the global citizen's network
L. Shmailo’s Patient Women Explores Mental Illness, Prostitution in NYC
Lifelong New Yorker Larissa Shmailo presents the novel Patient Women (BlazeVOX [books], 2015). Patient Women focuses on the tragedies, misadventures, and growth of one Nora Nader, born of Queens and darling of the New York disco scene. As the Era of Rock unravels, we follow Nora through her experiences as a runaway, low-dollar and high-class prostitute, party girl, and working stiff, into her story of self-awareness and addiction recovery as she “finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.” (K.R. Copeland, Midwest Book Review).
At twelve years old, Nora leaves her Holocaust-survivor parents and explores the worst that New York has to offer. From there, we follow her through mental hospitals, alcoholism, and the accidental drowning of her husband on their honeymoon. We meet her fellow prostitutes and travel with them as they attempt to move to other careers. We bear witness to Nora’s tepid experiences in psychotherapy and her extraordinary relationship with her transgender AA sponsor. We go with her as she returns to Queens to learn about her parents’ ordeal in the camps and also recovers her own suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Through Nora, we track the spiral of history, and how individual New Yorkers experience the underside of the 1970s—both its horrors and the redemption that could be found there.
PatientWomen
Patient Women reveals its author’s background as an accomplished poet and translator, and has been praised for balancing divergent literary styles while remaining an accessible page-turner. Second-generation Holocaust survivors, recovering addicts, and those experiencing mental illness will recognize their own stories in Patient Women, and find an insightful, well-written mirror that allows them to explore and articulate both their struggles and their triumphs.
Patient Women is a useful tool for individuals and groups studying the disco era and the AIDS crisis of New York in the 1970s and 80s. With its frank and thorough analysis of bipolar disorder and mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery, and incestual child abuse, it is of interest to therapists, therapy groups, and reading groups with an interest in recovery issues.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic living in New York. Her translations from Russian include the iconic avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. Ms. Shmailo is available for booking at (212) 712-9865.
More information can be found at www.LarissaShmailo.com, including the Electronic Press Kit for Ms. Shmailo and Patient Women (with high-resolution photos) at www.larissashmailo.com/…/larissa_shma...…. Patient Women is available for purchase through Amazon, and at on-line and physical bookstores.
Contact Jonathan Penton
[email protected], (337) 207-8713
Contact Larissa Shmailo
[email protected], (212) 712-9865
Lifelong New Yorker Larissa Shmailo presents the novel Patient Women (BlazeVOX [books], 2015). Patient Women focuses on the tragedies, misadventures, and growth of one Nora Nader, born of Queens and darling of the New York disco scene. As the Era of Rock unravels, we follow Nora through her experiences as a runaway, low-dollar and high-class prostitute, party girl, and working stiff, into her story of self-awareness and addiction recovery as she “finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.” (K.R. Copeland, Midwest Book Review).
At twelve years old, Nora leaves her Holocaust-survivor parents and explores the worst that New York has to offer. From there, we follow her through mental hospitals, alcoholism, and the accidental drowning of her husband on their honeymoon. We meet her fellow prostitutes and travel with them as they attempt to move to other careers. We bear witness to Nora’s tepid experiences in psychotherapy and her extraordinary relationship with her transgender AA sponsor. We go with her as she returns to Queens to learn about her parents’ ordeal in the camps and also recovers her own suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Through Nora, we track the spiral of history, and how individual New Yorkers experience the underside of the 1970s—both its horrors and the redemption that could be found there.
PatientWomen
Patient Women reveals its author’s background as an accomplished poet and translator, and has been praised for balancing divergent literary styles while remaining an accessible page-turner. Second-generation Holocaust survivors, recovering addicts, and those experiencing mental illness will recognize their own stories in Patient Women, and find an insightful, well-written mirror that allows them to explore and articulate both their struggles and their triumphs.
Patient Women is a useful tool for individuals and groups studying the disco era and the AIDS crisis of New York in the 1970s and 80s. With its frank and thorough analysis of bipolar disorder and mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery, and incestual child abuse, it is of interest to therapists, therapy groups, and reading groups with an interest in recovery issues.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic living in New York. Her translations from Russian include the iconic avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. Ms. Shmailo is available for booking at (212) 712-9865.
More information can be found at www.LarissaShmailo.com, including the Electronic Press Kit for Ms. Shmailo and Patient Women (with high-resolution photos) at www.larissashmailo.com/…/larissa_shma...…. Patient Women is available for purchase through Amazon, and at on-line and physical bookstores.
Contact Jonathan Penton
[email protected], (337) 207-8713
Contact Larissa Shmailo
[email protected], (212) 712-9865
January 10, 2016
My new websites-vids, poems, Patient Women, more
Dear friends, please check out my new website with performance videos, poems, reviews, and excerpts from PATIENT WOMEN. Please come visit!
http://larissashmailo.com/
http://larissashmailo.com/
Official Press Release for PATIENT WOMEN
Friends, here is the official press release for PATIENT WOMEN, If you know anyone who would like to review, please share.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Book Explores Mental Illness, Alcohol, Drug and Sex Addiction, and Prostitution in 1970s New York
Contact: Jonathan Penton
[email protected], (337) 207-8713
or
Larissa Shmailo
[email protected], (212) 712-9865
Lifelong New Yorker Larissa Shmailo presents the novel Patient Women (BlazeVOX [books], 2015). Patient Women focuses on the tragedies, misadventures, and growth of one Nora Nader, born of Queens and darling of the New York disco scene. As the Era of Rock unravels, we follow Nora through her experiences as a runaway, low-dollar and high-class prostitute, party girl, and working stiff, into her story of self-awareness and addiction recovery as she “finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.” (K.R. Copeland, Midwest Book Review).
At twelve years old, Nora leaves her Holocaust-survivor parents and explores the worst that New York has to offer. From there, we follow her through mental hospitals, alcoholism, and the accidental drowning of her husband on their honeymoon. We meet her fellow prostitutes and travel with them as they attempt to move to other careers. We bear witness to Nora’s tepid experiences in psychotherapy and her extraordinary relationship with her transgender AA sponsor. We go with her as she returns to Queens to learn about her parents’ ordeal in the camps and also recovers her own suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Through Nora, we track the spiral of history, and how individual New Yorkers experience the underside of the 1970s—both its horrors and the redemption that could be found there.
Patient Women reveals its author’s background as an accomplished poet and translator, and has been praised for balancing divergent literary styles while remaining an accessible page-turner. Second-generation Holocaust survivors, recovering addicts, and those experiencing mental illness will recognize their own stories in Patient Women, and find an insightful, well-written mirror that allows them to explore and articulate both their struggles and their triumphs.
Patient Women is a useful tool for individuals and groups studying the disco era and the AIDS crisis of New York in the 1970s and 80s. With its frank and thorough analysis of bipolar disorder and mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery, and incestual child abuse, it is of interest to therapists, therapy groups, and reading groups with an interest in recovery issues.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic living in New York. Her translations from Russian include the iconic avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. Ms. Shmailo is available for booking at (212) 712-9865.
More information can be found at www.LarissaShmailo.com, including the Electronic Press Kit for Ms. Shmailo and Patient Women (with high-resolution photos) at www.larissashmailo.com/…/larissa_shma...…. Patient Women is available for purchase through Amazon, and at on-line and physical bookstores.
# # #
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New Book Explores Mental Illness, Alcohol, Drug and Sex Addiction, and Prostitution in 1970s New York
Contact: Jonathan Penton
[email protected], (337) 207-8713
or
Larissa Shmailo
[email protected], (212) 712-9865
Lifelong New Yorker Larissa Shmailo presents the novel Patient Women (BlazeVOX [books], 2015). Patient Women focuses on the tragedies, misadventures, and growth of one Nora Nader, born of Queens and darling of the New York disco scene. As the Era of Rock unravels, we follow Nora through her experiences as a runaway, low-dollar and high-class prostitute, party girl, and working stiff, into her story of self-awareness and addiction recovery as she “finds herself capable of both physical and spiritual ascent.” (K.R. Copeland, Midwest Book Review).
At twelve years old, Nora leaves her Holocaust-survivor parents and explores the worst that New York has to offer. From there, we follow her through mental hospitals, alcoholism, and the accidental drowning of her husband on their honeymoon. We meet her fellow prostitutes and travel with them as they attempt to move to other careers. We bear witness to Nora’s tepid experiences in psychotherapy and her extraordinary relationship with her transgender AA sponsor. We go with her as she returns to Queens to learn about her parents’ ordeal in the camps and also recovers her own suppressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Through Nora, we track the spiral of history, and how individual New Yorkers experience the underside of the 1970s—both its horrors and the redemption that could be found there.
Patient Women reveals its author’s background as an accomplished poet and translator, and has been praised for balancing divergent literary styles while remaining an accessible page-turner. Second-generation Holocaust survivors, recovering addicts, and those experiencing mental illness will recognize their own stories in Patient Women, and find an insightful, well-written mirror that allows them to explore and articulate both their struggles and their triumphs.
Patient Women is a useful tool for individuals and groups studying the disco era and the AIDS crisis of New York in the 1970s and 80s. With its frank and thorough analysis of bipolar disorder and mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery, and incestual child abuse, it is of interest to therapists, therapy groups, and reading groups with an interest in recovery issues.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, editor, and critic living in New York. Her translations from Russian include the iconic avant-garde opera Victory over the Sun. Ms. Shmailo is available for booking at (212) 712-9865.
More information can be found at www.LarissaShmailo.com, including the Electronic Press Kit for Ms. Shmailo and Patient Women (with high-resolution photos) at www.larissashmailo.com/…/larissa_shma...…. Patient Women is available for purchase through Amazon, and at on-line and physical bookstores.
# # #
January 4, 2016
December 29, 2015
Thanks for a great literary 2015!
What a fantastic year 2015 has been! I want to thank everyone who helped me perform and publish and learn my craft this year. First, thank you Geoffrey Gatza and BlazeVOX [books] for publishing my novel, Patient Women, and to Meredith Sue Willis and Kimberly Rae Lorenz-Copeland for their thoughtful, insightful reviews, and to all my peeps in the Patient Women Facebook group for your enthusiastic readership.
I presented at two panels at AWP 2015, with poetry from the Eastern European Daughters of Baba Yaga and, moving in very erudite company indeed, on a translation panel with Matvei Yankelevich, Phil Metres, and Alexander Cigale. Speaking of translation, my rendering of Victory over the
Sun was performed in a high tech staging at Boston University under the auspices of director Anna Winestein and the Ballets Russes Initiative. It was also performed in part here in New York at the Cornelia Street Cafe with a brilliant performance by Bowery Bob Holman as the Time Traveler.
And then, to blow the roof off, there was the Unlikely Saints Poetry Tour of South Louisiana! OMG, New Orleans, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, I love you! Thanks to impressario Jonathan Penton and friends for life Alexandra Johnson and Wendy Taylor Carlisle.
I got my own Wikipedia page thjs year! I was proud to have work in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and to be interviewed on Pennsound and to have my critical article on Philip Nikolayev's immured sonnets, an invented form, translated into Italian for the international translation journal Grafias. And, thanks to Jonathan Penton again, I got a brand new website: www.larissashmailo.com
Best of all, I studied meter and poetry with Annie Ridley Crane Finch -if only all teachers were like this guiding, inspiring woman! So proud to be presenting with Annie, Timothy Steele, Dean Kostos, and Amanda Johnson at AWP 16 next year.
Friends, thank you for making this possible. I kiss you all and wish you a very happy New Year indeed.
I presented at two panels at AWP 2015, with poetry from the Eastern European Daughters of Baba Yaga and, moving in very erudite company indeed, on a translation panel with Matvei Yankelevich, Phil Metres, and Alexander Cigale. Speaking of translation, my rendering of Victory over the
Sun was performed in a high tech staging at Boston University under the auspices of director Anna Winestein and the Ballets Russes Initiative. It was also performed in part here in New York at the Cornelia Street Cafe with a brilliant performance by Bowery Bob Holman as the Time Traveler.
And then, to blow the roof off, there was the Unlikely Saints Poetry Tour of South Louisiana! OMG, New Orleans, Lafayette, Baton Rouge, I love you! Thanks to impressario Jonathan Penton and friends for life Alexandra Johnson and Wendy Taylor Carlisle.
I got my own Wikipedia page thjs year! I was proud to have work in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and to be interviewed on Pennsound and to have my critical article on Philip Nikolayev's immured sonnets, an invented form, translated into Italian for the international translation journal Grafias. And, thanks to Jonathan Penton again, I got a brand new website: www.larissashmailo.com
Best of all, I studied meter and poetry with Annie Ridley Crane Finch -if only all teachers were like this guiding, inspiring woman! So proud to be presenting with Annie, Timothy Steele, Dean Kostos, and Amanda Johnson at AWP 16 next year.
Friends, thank you for making this possible. I kiss you all and wish you a very happy New Year indeed.
November 10, 2015
Southern Love for PATIENT WOMEN
We just finished the fourth leg of our Unlikely Saints tour of Southern Louisiana, with shows in New Orleans, Baton Rouge. Lafayette, and Grand Coteau. What an experience! The poetry, the music, the dancing, the food, and most of all, the people! Thanks to Jonathan Penton for organizing this mindblowing word trip! I'll be back for more crawfish, zydeco dancing, and southern love soon!
October 29, 2015
Enter the PATIENT WOMEN Goodreads Giveaway!
Enter to receive a FREE signed copy of PATIENT WOMEN. See Giveaway link for details.
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
September 13, 2015
Great review of Patient Women in Books for Readers
Meredith Sue Willis has succinctly stated my protagonist Nora's (and my) salvation in his great review of Patient Women: We can be with people; we can create. Thank you all for reading!
http://meredithsuewillis.com/booksfor...
http://meredithsuewillis.com/booksfor...
September 1, 2015
Great review of Patient Women
Dive into the deep end: read this novel! Unforgettable and mesmerizing!
By M. Tuite on August 27, 2015
There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. "Patient Women" is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by "Patient Women". WOW!!! Unforgettable!
By M. Tuite on August 27, 2015
There are many categories of writing, but as readers there are two distinct places we tend to go: either `escape from reality' mode or `dive into the deep end' through writing that unnerves us on a personal level. The poems/stories or novels may be situated in different continents, cultures, even species, and yet they confront us with fragments of ourselves that defy diversity.
Shmailo's work takes me to places in my life that I am both afraid and compelled by. There is no escape here. It is about recognition and a fortitude that didn't exist before. It is about finding oneself again, in amazement and thankfulness, through another writer's words.
Here are some quotes from Shmailo's novel, Patient Women.
"There was anger in the house, anger in the very walls."
"Home life acquired a dangerous sameness."
"Nora had learned to detect the subtlest shifts in the affective atmosphere of her home: she became expert in detecting and defusing the charges, like a teenage bomb squad."
"Nora kept rattling him like a jammed door she was sure she had the right to enter."
"God writes straight with crooked lines, Nora..."
Shmailo takes the reader into the world of a strong, sensitive, acute protagonist, Nora, who moves through many lives in this novel. She is a sex worker, a brilliant woman, an incest survivor, a woman who takes us into the streets and wrestles with her/our inner/outer demons. "Patient Women" is a novel everyone should read. There is no shrinking back from the violence Nora experiences and witnesses and the power of Shmailo's brilliant writing that takes us inside all of it.
Don't miss out on this! Get a copy and find yourself mesmerized and changed by "Patient Women". WOW!!! Unforgettable!
August 18, 2015
Save thThe NYC Patient Women launch party 9/8
Friends, save the date! The NYC launch party will happen Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 7:00 pm at Uncle Vanya's, 315 W 54. Readings by Alexander Cigale, Steve Dalachinsky, Bonny Finberg, Patricia Spears Jones, Ron Kolm, Irina Mashinski, Yuko Otomo, Audrey Roth, Thaddeus Rutkowski, yours truly, and other special guests. More details as I get them.This event is sponsored by the Russian American Cultural Center, so it will be a blast. I absolutely hope to see every single one of you there!
