It's No Good By Kirill Medvedev; edited by Keith Gessen; trans. Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, Bela Shayevich, book review

Accepting The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last month, Jenny Erpenbeck made a thoughtful observation when she said that the English translation of her winning novel, The End of Days, is her book but her translator's words. Like Erpenbeck, who grew up in the German Democratic Republic, Kirill Medvedev is interested in art's role in a society that's emerging from the legacies of communism. Hailed by one of his translators, Keith Gessen, as "Russia's first authentic post-Soviet writer", Medvedev begins this collection of his poems, essays and "actions" by announcing that he will no longer translate works into Russian.