Home
RUSSIAN DEVOLUTION It's Moscow, 1992. The KGB dispatches a scientist to the future to determine the effects of perestroika. He finds that Gorbachev has been deposed-and the entire Soviet empire has been pitched into anarchy and civil war. That's the scenario in No Return, a novella by Aleksandr Kabakov (below) that created a stir in the Soviet Union when it was published there in June 1989. ''It captured the mood of the country,'' says Douglas Stumpf, Kabakov's editor at Morrow, which is publishing an English edition this fall. ''Everyone was reading it and talking about it.'' In fact, Stumpf claims, Kabakov is now a Soviet household world. ''Something ominous will happen and people will say, * 'It's just like in Kabakov.''' Morrow is billing No Return as ''the most famous 1984-type fiction of the glasnost era.'' Interestingly, the long-banned 1984 has just been published in the Soviet Union for the first time.
SPURNED Bonnie Kaufman started the American Society for Rejected Writers after a magazine returned her submission without the courtesy of a form rejection letter. ''I placed an ad in New York magazine that said, 'American Society of Rejected Writers Wants You' with my phone number,'' Kaufman says. So far she's had about 150 responses from writers eager to share their rejection letters. According to Kaufman, the worst editorial response thus far was this one- liner: ''I can't, I just can't.'' Although the society's original purpose was ''to have fun by trashing editors,'' Kaufman says there's more to it than that. ''It's really to help people deal with rejection, to know that the reasons for rejection aren't always logical sometimes you just catch an editor in a bad mood.'' She should know-she works part-time as an editor for a small New York City paper. But she says her rejections are all kind: ''If I see any potential, I say they can rework it. If there's no hope, I blame it on my boss.'' Those interested in joining Kaufman's society may write to her at 225 Central Park West, 1117, New York, NY 10024.
