About this item

An irresistible debut that follows a Russian American girl's bumpy path to adulthood as she longs for a homeland she never knew When Oksana's family begin their new American life in Florida after emigrating from Ukraine, her physicist father delivers pizza at night to make ends meet, her depressed mother sits home all day worrying, and her flamboyant grandmother relishes the attention she gets when she walks Oksana to school, not realizing that the street they're walking down is known as Prostitute Street. Oksana just wants to have friends and lead a normal life - and though she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting herself in trouble. As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted (and expensive-to-replace) key to New York City's Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man.



About the Author

Maria Kuznetsova

Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the United States as a child. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the author of Oksana, Behave! (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2019) and the forthcoming novel Something Unbelievable (Random House, April 6, 2021) . Her fiction can be found in journals including The Southern Review, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the Threepenny Review, and Kenyon Review Online. Her essays can be found in Guernica, Catapult, Slate Magazine, and more. She is the fiction editor of The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature. She is also an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband, daughter, and cat.



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