The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

In 1943, the Soviet Union’s most revered author, Konstantin Paustovsky, started out on his masterwork – a grand, sprawling memoir of a life lived on the fast-unfurling frontiers of Russian history. Originally published in six volumes, it would cement Paustovsky’s reputation as the voice of Russia around the world, and see him nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Newly translated by Guggenheim fellow Douglas Smith, the first three volumes take the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian childhood and youth, struggling with a family on the verge of collapse and first flourishes of creative ambition, to his experiences as a paramedic on Russia’s frontlines, and then as a journalist aspiring to cover the country’s many revolutions.