Awards

• Short-listed for 2023 English PEN Award 2023

Overview

What is history, undocumented? How do we archive censored lives? A poetic reflection on authorship and erasure, *A Book, Untitled* is an intimate and innovative approach to autofiction and the act of remembering. In her first novel, Armenian writer Shushan Avagyan tells the story of a fictional encounter between Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan, two early twentieth-century pioneers of feminist literature, whose legacies have been obscured in Armenian history. Their fictive meeting is interspersed with conversations between the author and her friend Lara, who are researching the work of Kurghinian and Yesayan. While sifting through censored documents, unpublished works, and unfinished drafts, they linger in speculation and piece together lives that have been overshadowed by the Tsarist and Stalinist regimes. At once electric and ephemeral, *A Book, Untitled* is a story of re-cognition otherwise—posthumous, imagined, and intricately powerful.

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9781911284888

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Reviews

"""The English-speaking world already owes Shushan Avagyan a tremendous debt for her essential translations of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Now she has composed a brilliant novel of her own. A Book, Untitled is a powerful pastiche of voices and eras, as well as a feminist reclamation of Armenian women writers lost to time. For all its shifting, its purposeful resistance, its sharpness and darkness, I found this book simply delightful.”- Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture; ""At once lyrical and theoretical, personal and protest, Avagyan’s singular approach fabricates a polyvocal palimpsest tinged with exile and opacity, distortion and estrangement. Authorship, and the hegemony from which it hails, will never be the same.” - Alex Brostoff, co-translator of Ailton Krenak's Life Is Not Useful"

Author Information

Shushan Avagyan is the translator of Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, On the Theory of Prose by Viktor Shklovsky (Dalkey Archive), Art and Production by Boris Arvatov (Pluto), and I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian (AIWA). Her articles and translations have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, CONTEXT, Asymptote, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Music & Literature, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She teaches at the American University of Armenia.

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