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  1. Chronogram

    01.Nov.07, 20:40 EDT
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    Book Reviews: Russian Lover and Other Stories by Anne Pyburn, August 27, 2007 A well-done short story feels miraculous, the selection of just the right moments and details to create an entire reality in a bite-sized handful of pages. Woodstock author Jana Martin gets it right. The reader knows everything he or she needs to know; the characters breathe and sweat and could go on with their lives for a novel’s worth of time and we’d not be bored. Yet the moments she brings into focus do, in themselves, form a seamless, satisfying whole. Martin catches her heroines—who are, to a woman, appealing, imperfect, and forthright—at watershed moments of transition. She has a refined sense of how strange this world can get. In her hands, experiences that might seem familiar (such as a long-distance bus trip) can be filled with revelatory nuance. The title story, “Russian Lover,” is a series of attempts on the part of a young divorcee to apologize, by letter, for an episode in which she flew into a frenzy at her inlaws’ Christmas dinner, sending food and crockery flying. Seen through the lens of her memory, the episode is horrifying and hilarious, inevitable and regrettable. The narrator’s after-the-fact understanding of the forces in the air around that stultifying bourgeois dinner table could save her mother-in-law thousands in therapists’ bills—if the woman could but comprehend, if the letter were ever actually completed and sent. But, one way or another, the protagonist will be fine. She’s a survivor. So is Rita, the sweet-natured lass who’s recovering, with the help of her lover, from a traumatic brain injury. Martin’s got a gift for creating microportraits of people you’ve glimpsed on the street or met at a party: “He was pale, slender, not tall, not short, with coat-hanger shoulders and a serious but boyish milky face. She was retro fleshpot, cinched into vintage, black lacquered hair, black nails, dark voice. They lived in a shitty loft, drove an old car, maybe someday they’d get married, maybe they’d stay underground forever.” The lovers are intellectual indie musicians, and the way they handle the accident and its aftermath—including Rita’s improbable obsession with John Denver—makes for a fresh love story with a satisfying happy ending. Extremely brief depictions—a country girl packing to move, a war-veteran father at a barbecue—are sprinkled among the longer pieces, exotic seasonings in a salad. Martin’s rich imagery brings to vivid life the exotic side of the mundane, and reveals the mundane within the exotic worlds of a dominatrix or a topless dancer. (“I thought I’d wear the [thigh-high] boots out until I tripped on the shiny tile by the hiking boot display, nearly went over, thought better of it.”) Places, like people, are evoked with a couple of well-chosen phrases. Martin knows Florida and Boston and New Jersey as intimately as she knows the interior lives of women in crisis. You can smell and taste and see them. Russian Lover is the first book released by Verse Chorus’s new Yeti imprint (followed by a collection of essays by Luc Sante, to be reviewed in October). The author’s bio mentions that Martin and her dog are learning search and rescue. Somehow, it seems an ideal avocation for one who understands so thoroughly the ways in which people map paths out of the emotional wilderness of our modern world. http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2007/9/Books/Book-Reviews-Russian-Lover-and-Other-Stories

  2. CityPaper.net

    01.Nov.07, 20:38 EDT
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    Russian Lover and Other Stories By Jana Martin Yeti/Verse Chorus Press, 224 pp., $15.95 In the title story from Jana Martin's debut collection, and the first book published by the makers of the revered Yeti zine, a young divorce settles in to compose a letter to her former mother-in-law. Through several drafts, she lets her mind and mood wander from sorry (about hurling serving dishes at the wall at Christmas dinner) to not-quite-over-it (does mom know her son's a cheating, passionless asshole?) to kinda over it (an affair with the half-Jamaican hunk down the hall is good medicine). When it's not slyly funny, she encloses a check to cover the cost of cleaning gravy off of the wallpaper, "Russian Lover" is gutpunchingly painful, written from a place of genuine heartbreak. That story alone is worth the price of admission, but Martin has a few more tricks. One story's arranged like definitions but reads like word association; another is so clipped you can practically hear the clock ticking between each sentence fragment. Most of the protagonists are sharp but snakebitten women: strippers, junkies, a dominatrix-in-training, sufferers of unknown and comical ailments. Precise, succinct language keeps the reader in the moment and unprepared for a subtle evolution into the fantastic. In other words: You buy it long before you know you're being sold something. But not so much because Martin's a sweet talker; with prose so forthright and deliberate it's easy to believe you're in the hands of a straight shooter. That's what makes it so surprising, so captivating, when you suddenly realize she's been pulling a fast one on you. http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/06/28/short-stories#Russian_Lover_and_Other_Stories

  3. Time Out Chicago

    01.Nov.07, 20:30 EDT
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    Big girls don’t cry Jana Martin’s characters scramble out of their desperate lives. By Jonathan Messinger Plenty of writers plumb their day jobs for subject matter—witness the unending stream of novels about office life. But few are able to pick up a theme from their work and bring it into their fiction the way Jana Martin has done in her new short-story collection, Russian Lover (Yeti/Verse Chorus Press, $15.95). “I did a story once [for Marie Claire] about women who had gone to extreme measures, these women who had done all of these things to their bodies with plastic surgery,” she says. “And this was before plastic surgery was so grotesquely normal. I not only interviewed them, but I had to get them to agree to pose naked for the magazine. I was very proud of that story.” While plastic surgery doesn’t play a role in Russian Lover, Martin’s interest in women pushed to the extreme clearly extends from her journalism to her fiction. In the opening story, “Hope,” which won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers in 1999, a woman hooked on heroin boards a Greyhound from Boston to Florida, leaving her loser ex-boyfriend behind. The impetus is a bad infection from a dirty needle, but the reader slowly gets the impression there’s more to the story than the standard junkie-on-the-mend motif. The character’s old-fashioned father arrives in the story via phone calls and memories, and one wonders which of the two is more sad. In “Why I Got Fired,” a stripper runs through a litany of abuses, including harassment from her landlord, a police officer and countless paying customers. The story begins with her at 19, giving a lap dance to a guy who’s unzipped his pants. In a poetic, real-time voice, the narrator reacts: “Jumping off the rude guy and clocking him in the jaw.” After leaving Cleveland for a “new city five years later,” she has to put up with more of the same. Only this time, her reaction is fiercer: “Glorious hands out and waiting for a man’s naked silly neck and yelling This one’s for Cleveland.” Many of the women similarly toe the line between tough and vulnerable, endearingly troubled troublemakers. Rather than a single action or decision forging the conflict of the stories, the characters’ entire lives up until the moment of the story serve as the driving force. When we tell Martin she seems to have a curious affection for, and interest in, damaged women, she bristles at our word choice. “I think of them as girls on the lam,” she says. “Damaged implies a type of psychological state to me. But these are girls in desperate situations. Certainly they’re in dire straits that they haven’t quite figured out how to fix. But they’re trying to fix it.” It has been eight years since “Hope” got her noticed in literary circles, though this is Martin’s debut. She says a novel—distilled into the dominatrix story here called “Rubber Days”—came close to publication, but its racy nature scared off some editors. She’s continued to work as a freelance writer, and as a freelance editor for The New York Times, from her home in Woodstock, New York. When a friend of hers who edits the revered Portland, Oregon, music magazine Yeti began asking her for work, it became clear hers would be the first book published by Yeti’s new press. Like the characters in her stories, the actual stories had figured out a way to get out of a desperate situation. “I had a lot of friends who had thrived on small presses, and I felt this was the thing to do,” she says. “At the time, my mother was very sick, and I wanted to publish these stories as a group in a safe place. These guys were an incredibly safe home.” Martin reads Tuesday 10 as part of the Bookslut series. http://www.timeout.com/chicago/article/books/20881/big-girls-dont-cry

  4. Boston.com

    01.Nov.07, 20:27 EDT
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    "Russian Lover and Other Stories (Yeti), by Jana Martin. The excellent Portland, OR-based book-plus-CD arts journal Yeti is branching into book publishing, in association with Verse Chorus Press, and "Russian Lover," a collection of stories about tough-yet-fragile women drifting into new cities, is Yeti's first title. (Scoop up a first edition while you can!) Martin, who grew up partly in Boston, employs the city in much the same way that midcentury, live-action Disney movies used to: as a repressive place that you must leave if you want to be happy and fulfilled. In Martin's "Hope," the protagonist -- about whom we know nothing except that her father is a projectionist at "a Cambridge art house" -- abandons her lousy Boston apartment and her boyfriend ("a pseudo rocker in smallbutt jeans," this means you!), and leaves "that bleak northern city" on a bus headed for Florida. Buy a copy to read at the beach; you will not be disappointed.