Overview

A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life. Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the twentieth century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending, or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate? In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants--and the fragility of citizenship--are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

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Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, a gritty and darkly humorous novel inspired by her family's saga and the fact that she could not find her Appalachian coal mining ancestors-immigrants of the Old Believer Russian Orthodox faith-on any bookshelf. How long does it take to write a book? This one has been in the works ever since her mother named her for her two grandmothers: Mary, who married her Russian-born husband at fourteen and had eleven children, and Kay, who forced the mining company to pay in cash rather than scrip and then got her husband away from the mines before black lung killed him. Mary Kay is also the author of Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, as well as The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls. She is the winner of the American Academy's Rosenthal Award and a multiple recipient of the DC Artist Fellowship. Born in Syracuse, raised in Oklahoma City, and educated in Houston and Baltimore, she lives in Washington, DC. Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, a gritty and darkly humorous novel inspired by her family's saga and the fact that she could not find her Appalachian coal mining ancestors-immigrants of the Old Believer Russian Orthodox faith-on any bookshelf. How long does it take to write a book? This one has been in the works ever since her mother named her for her two grandmothers: Mary, who married her Russian-born husband at fourteen and had eleven children, and Kay, who forced the mining company to pay in cash rather than scrip and then got her husband away from the mines before black lung killed him. Mary Kay is also the author of Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book, as well as The Bowl Is Already Broken and The Frequency of Souls. She is the winner of the American Academy's Rosenthal Award and a multiple recipient of the DC Artist Fellowship. Born in Syracuse, raised in Oklahoma City, and educated in Houston and Baltimore, she lives in Washington, DC.

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