Shelfies #26: Alex Shvartsman

Space is at a premium in NYC, but that hasn’t stopped me from dedicating an unhealthy amount of it to bookshelves. Books are everywhere in our Brooklyn apartment: the living room, my son’s bedroom, on my nightstand quietly plotting my demise by toppling…. And, of course, in my home office where I write.

There’s only room for a couple of bookcases in my office, so I keep all of my contributor copies there (The brag shelves! Who doesn’t love brag shelves?) as well as a handful of precious books that could be best described as my comfort tomes. These contain books by my friends—virtually all of them signed and personalized to me—and a handful of other select treasures like these: 

Novels by Mikhail Bulgakov

This 1973 Russian language collection of three novels by Bulgakov (titled Novels with all the imagination and marketing finesse the Soviet Communists are famous for) was the first book printing of The Master and Margarita in the Soviet Union. The subversive novel got past the censors but soon the smarter censors realized the mistake and much of the tiny 30,000 copy print run was destroyed. 

The Master and Margarita remains my favorite Russian language novel and is one of the greatest books of the 20^th century. Bulgakov invented magical realism decades before Marques and the others, and he combined it with a sharp satire of the Soviet regime (a theme he also explored in Heart of a Dog). I’ve read this book a dozen times over and it is one of the few books my family kept when we emigrated. It’s probably the book I’d choose to get stranded with on a desert island (unless the other choices include an edible edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica).

Star Wolf by Edmond Hamilton

Growing up in Odesa, Ukraine I voraciously read any and all science fiction I could get my hands on. Few were available; fewer still by Western authors had been approved for translation. As such, we had access to many of the classics but some of the more pulpy sub-genres like sword-and-sorcery or space opera were virtually unheard of, until a youth magazine serialized Tales of the Star Kings by Edmond Hamilton. I loved the scope of it so much. Between reading that and watching the Star Wars movies, I was totally on board with the grand-scale entertainment such stories could offer a middle-grade reader.

Ever since immigrating to New York in April 1990, I’d greedily eyed all the cool paperbacks I couldn’t yet read, many by authors I’d sampled in translation. One time I came upon an Edmond Hamilton book at a library sale and picked it up for a quarter. Star Wolf sat on my shelf for about a year as I studied English and vowed I would soon read it and other books I’d similarly collected. On January 1, 1992 I finally took the plunge: I pulled the dog-eared paperback off my shelf and began to read. Two weeks later, it became the first book I ever finished in English.

The Incarceration of Captain Nebula by Mike Resnick

I’ve been a lifelong SF fan but I never met a writer in real life until after I’d been published. It was a couple of years later that I befriended Mike Resnick (of whose work I was already a big fan) and he became a formative influence. He taught me the value of paying it forward as he ceaselessly helped and promoted newer writers. He published my stories and I had the privilege of publishing some of his. More importantly, we became friends, often chatting on Facebook Messenger late into the evening about books and life. Mike never ran out of amusing anecdotes.

I have a number of his other signed books, but he once sent me this collection of his award-winning stories, many of which I love. I don’t remember the reason—a birthday gift perhaps, or simply an act of kindness, but it’s the book that reminds me the most of the friend I miss dearly. 

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, translator, and anthologist from Brooklyn, NY. He’s the author of Kakistocracy (2023), The Middling Affliction (2022), and Eridani’s Crown (2019) fantasy novels. Over 120 of his short stories have appeared in Analog, Nature, Strange Horizons, and many other venues.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.