SENTENCE
This page functions as a table of contents for Mikhail Iossel's series SENTENCE, and will be updated as new instalments are added.
Mikhail Iossel is on the Red Arrow night express train from Moscow to Leningrad on January 9, 1986, when he meets a fellow traveler with two bottles of brandy and a box of chocolates. It’s a journey that can be told in a sentence.
Mikhail Iossel pauses in a Montreal metro underpass to listen to a busking middle-aged violinist playing Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2.” It’s a melody that can fit into a sentence.
In 1983 Leningrad, at an underground art exhibition, Mikhail Iossel meets a German man who tells Iossel how he survived the Nazi era. A story in a burning sentence.
Seven-year-old Mikhail Iossel is writing out the alphabet in a Soviet communal apartment. Clean writing in a sentence.
Mikhail Iossel is having black tea and an almond croissant in a downtown shopping mall when a middle-aged man plunks himself down directly opposite Iossel at the otherwise empty long table. A life story in a sentence.
Mikhail Iossel is riding a city bus in Montreal and thinking about a recently dead friend and a man on the street who resembles the friend with whom he’s lost touch. It’s a no-story in a “hasty” sentence, the latest installment of Iossel’s stories (and non-stories) in a single sentence.
Mikhail Iossel’s friend has an after-dinner nap nightmare about a firing squad. The latest installment of Iossel’s stories in one sentence.
Mikhail Iossel recalls a moment in Leningrad as an 8-year-old Jewish boy, a luminous moment of being, loss, love, and language. The latest installment of SENTENCE, Iossel’s series of stories in a single sentence.
Mikhail Iossel is in Kenya, being interviewed by a Young Writer for a Nairobi-based publication, who, upon being shown some photos of Iossel in his youthful 20s, asks, “But… but… what happened?” SENTENCE: LIFE HAPPENED is the latest in Iossel’s series of stories-in-one-sentence.