Rubin’s BluePrint project involves the publishing of her fourth book, a collection of flash fiction stories considering existentialism, Jewish identity, Russian upbringing, transcendentalism, cultural genetics, time travel, religion. Telling the stories in a style that is ”Babel meets Sholom Aleichem,” they describe the hilarious truth about being a newcomer to the American cultural house and ironically enough a shy outsider to the Jewish religious community. Five of the published and critically-acclaimed jewels within the collection are a chronicle of one family’s journey coming to America in the early 90s called, “Welcome to America.”
Her website is www.marinarubin.com
Literature with an Adrenaline Rush
Reviews:
“Short and sudden, none longer than a page, these tales are funny and embarrassing and sad and honest. Tradition intersects with cultural displacement as Rubin tells tales of dating mishaps and wardrobe malfunctions. Stealing Cherries is not your typical story of Russian refuseniks—and that’s exactly why we love it…”
–Jewniverse
http://thejewniverse.com/2013/dating-in-brooklyn-while-russian/
“Like Russian-born novelists Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis, Marina Rubin mines her immigrant experience for her fiction, uncovering the universal. Her writing is sparse and precise, yet also lush, with long sentences packed full of life, drama and artistry…”
–Jewish Week
http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/books/short-fiction
“Rubin is a new voice on the scene and her collection of flash fiction was a revelation…Her writing has such a sharp focus that she successfully captures an event and mood in very few words. While these funny, strange, off-beat works are called fiction, the ones written in the first person read like autobiography. Rubin does an excellent job capturing small, sometimes shocking, moments…”
–The Reporter
http://www.thereportergroup.org/Article.aspx?aID=3463
“Marina Rubin writes the shortest short stories around – they’re almost prose poems, each filling a rectangle of text on the page. Her stories in Stealing Cherries burst out of their boxes, as she writes with exuberance about her family’s experience as immigrants from the former Soviet Union and of her own later experiences working, traveling and becoming an American…”
–Jewish Woman Magazine
http://www.jwmag.org/page.aspx?pid=3859#sthash.9osZdL10.dpbs
” For the flash-fiction fan, ADD-suffering reader or David Sedaris admirer: Marina Rubin’s collection of micro-stories, hits all the right notes with its humor, mild perversity and warmth…Poetic, punchy and packed with vignettes, Stealing Cherries will pop your brain…”
–Coachella Valley Independent
“The flash stories are a veritable bushel of stolen cherries, each one is a delight to read, sweet and best enjoyed in bunches. A slight bitterness follows, we’re too old to enjoy stolen cherries, too grownup to snatch virgin fruit and eat it with unconscious abandon, but the memory of the taste, and the echoes within these stories are still delightful to carry within us afterwards.”
–Nano Fiction
http://nanofiction.org/weekly-feature/reviews/2014/05/stealing-cherries-by-marina-rubin
“…its intimate clash of cultures, political and economic antagonisms, and transgressive sexualities are never very far from the surface of these sometimes nostalgic, sometimes bittersweet, often sensual fictions.”
— Urban Graffiti
http://urbgraffiti.com/review/stealing-cherries-marina-rubin-review-mark-mccawley
Links to Youtube videos
Fellows
Marina Rubin Stealing Cherries Marina Rubin was born in the small town of Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. Her family immigrated to United States in 1989 seeking asylum. Her first chapbook Ode to Hotels(2002) was followed by Once(2004) and Logic(2007). Her work had appeared in over seventy magazines and anthologies including 13th Warrior Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Dos Passos Review, 5AM, Nano Fiction, Coal City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Jewish Currents, Lillith, Pearl, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, The Portland Review, The Worcester Review and many more. She is an associate editor of Mudfish, the Tribeca literary and art magazine. Her work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and again in 2012. She is a 2013 recipient of the COJECO Blueprint Fellowship. Her fourth book, a collection of flash fiction stories Stealing Cherries was released in November 2013 from Manic D Press and is available on Amazon, B&N and other booksellers nationwide.
