A Book, Untitled, Shushan Avagyan (softcover)

To read A Book, Untitled, is to experience the erasure of two literary figures of the early twentieth century: Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Written as a literary experiment, A Book Untitled puts an imaginary meeting of 1926 between Kurghinian and Yesayan in conversation with the contemporary narrator’s effort to unearth their fragmented stories. Excavating these narratives from the censorship of Stalin’s regime and the patriarchal lens that structures the Armenian literary canon is not easy task; documents have been redacted, authors are uncited, texts have been left unfinished. And yet, through these conundrums, the novel urges its readers to reimagine the past so that the present might be lived otherwise.