Maria Stepanova Books in Order

After her aunt’s death, a writer examines an apartment filled with photographs, letters and diaries. Tracing her Jewish family through twentieth-century Russia, she reflects on memory, persecution and the difficulty of recovering other people’s lives from their surviving belongings.

Spanning two decades, these poems and essays explore history, violence and the ways language carries collective memory. Stepanova moves between experimental verse, songs and literary reflection, considering writers and the upheavals shaping Russia and Ukraine.

These long poems confront war, historical violence and the unstable relationship between past and present. Drawing on ballads, songs and other inherited forms, Stepanova explores how language preserves traumatic experience and becomes implicated in its repetition.

An exiled writer struggling to work leaves for a literary festival but ends up stranded in an unfamiliar coastal town. Separated from her phone and ordinary identity, she encounters a circus and the possibility of disappearing into another life.