Posts by Nadya Williams
October 27, 2025
A lot can happen in nine months. A baby grows from a tiny fleck invisible to the naked eye into a full-size infant and is born. A school year begins and ends.
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September 10, 2025
In Dorothy Sayers’s 1923 whodunit,
Whose Body?, an unidentified dead body, naked but for a pince-nez, is mysteriously dropped off in the bathtub of a perfectly ordinary, respectable home. Who is Mr.
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July 01, 2025
There is blood seeping from under an otherwise ordinary shed door in the city. This possible sign of a crime sets in motion the plot of
The Stolen Heart, Andrey Kurkov’s second installment in the delightful series of Kyiv mysteries, set nearly 100 years ago and following the low-brow exploits of a young policeman, Samson Kolechko (“The Ring”).
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May 14, 2025
In 1991, my family faced a choice for the first time: We could remain in Russia or take advantage of the temporarily loosened borders and immigrate to Israel.
There was a significant hurdle to overcome, however.
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April 17, 2025
In December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. My family had left just a few months earlier to immigrate to Israel from Leningrad—which reverted post-collapse to its pre-revolutionary name of St. Petersburg.
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February 26, 2025
The house has a small garden with a couple of flower beds and a more practical patch for planting potatoes. Fruit trees and berry bushes also are squeezed in somehow, belying how small the space is.
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December 10, 2024
On February 16, 2024, Alexei Navalny died under mysterious circumstances in the remote Siberian penal colony to which he was moved in late 2023. Founder and leader of the Anti- Corruption Foundation, Navalny was a long-time dissident and one of the most vocal critics of Putin’s regime over the past two decades, so his suspicious death was no surprise to anyone remotely acquainted with contemporary Russian politics.
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October 23, 2024
In a prison dank and dark, somewhere outside the town of Pavia in northern Italy, a middle-aged man whiles away his final days, writing. His execution looms, and he knows it.
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