Customer Reviews

The Red Passport: Stories

5 star:		(7)
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Bravo to Katherine Shonk--The Red Passport is a welcome and rare showcase for the classic craft of the American short story. Katherine's characters (sometimes bursting with youth and other times exhausted from life's trials) are both unique and universal. She shares an understanding of human experience and modern-day Russian that, along with her wonderful ear for language and eye for surroundings, draws her characters to life on the page. Her style is clear and captivating, each metaphor a little miracle. I look forward to more from this outstanding American author.

The Red Passport is gem of a book. On one level, Shonk is exploring Russian and American perceptions (and misperceptions) of each other. In that respect, it makes a fascinating cultural study. The stories are precise and melancholy comedies (or tragedies) of cross-cultural manners. But the book really sticks with you for another reason: Shonk gets under her characters' skin and reveals them in all their yearning and weakness. The sentences are lucid and beautiful, yet the writing is never showy. You get to the last page and long for more. Shonk, with her generosity and restraint, is a gift to contemporary American literature. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't love this book.

This is a wise, sensitive, warm book which illustrates what happens when people reach out for one another across language barriers and internal barriers. Here is an author who shows the Russian people as they are, human, heartbreaking and courageous. Ms. Shonk deftly treats all her charactors and their struggles equally, so invariably both American and Russian charactors speak the same universal language of loss and hope. I have never been to Russia, but I felt instantly transported there, and saw many similarities between our peoples. So, the only prerequisite for this book is an interest in human nature. READ IT!!! You'll be happy you did!

This collection of stories set in Russia is a rare find. Shonk is a really terrific, hugely promising writer - I haven't picked up a book in a while and kept falling through layers, finding that it's even better and deeper than I'd at first realized.

Very good.

As I've lived in Russia, the Red Passport rang a lot of bells. Apart from reflecting with considerable verisimilitude certain attitudes in Russia albeit from an American point of view, the difficulty of writing simple, successful prose while embodying complex truths is the main reason I wholeheartedly recommend this collection.

I usually read non-fiction and this was the first collection of contemporary short stories I've read for a long time but also one of the finest and I was transfixed throughout.

These are beautifully written stories that stay with you. I was drawn to the characters in this book, both the Americans and Russians, and was really moved by the stories. The author captures characters dealing with life in a rapidly-changing Russian society and she does it with a sense of humor and understanding. This is a really, really excellent collection of short stories. I'd check it out.

Having just returned from a three month trip to Russia and Ukraine this past spring, I was shocked and incredibly pleased to see how clearly the stories in Shonk's book mirrored my own experiences and impressions of the people I met. I immediately looked online to see if she'd written any others! The short stories cut right to the heart of a lot of the experiences that Russians are going through today, 17 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the interactions between Westerners and Russians are also still apt. Her writing is excellent and will pull you in, leaving you itching to hop on a train yourself and trek through the new, developing Russia...