Seattle Rep presents MOTHER RUSSIA by Lauren Yee from March 6 to April 6, 2025. Librarians at Seattle Public Library created this list of books, films and music to enhance your experience of the show.
Secondhand Time
Journalist Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl), who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, captures the heartache, excitement, and harsh realities of life at the end of the Soviet era and the birth of modern Russia. (Library Journal)
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Chasing A Butterfly
In this 2005 documentary, director Natasha Guruleva returns to her hometown of Vladivostock after a decade away, intending to resettle there. But post-Soviet Russia is an unfamiliar place and Guruleva is no longer certain she belongs.
Format: Streaming Video
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Finna
Like MOTHER RUSSIA, Finna is a comic tale of low-wage workers, here set in a big-box Scandinavian furniture store that also happens to be a portal into the multiverse.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The Future Is History
Gessen, the esteemed Russian-American journalist, takes an intimate look at Russia in the post-Soviet period, when the public's hopes for democracy devolved within a restricted society characterized by "a constant state of low-level dread." (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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True Failure
Higley's darkly comic novel is "a twisting examination of life under late capitalism and the deceptions we inhabit to invent our own success stories." (publisher description)
Format: Book
Availability: On order
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Inside McDonald's
McDonald's symbolizes the world of capitalism in MOTHER RUSSIA. Take a deeper look inside the corporation with this brief documentary.
Format: Streaming Video
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The Kilroys List
MOTHER RUSSIA playwright Lauren Yee is featured in this collection with "Colony Collapse."
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Death and the Penguin
Hired to write obituaries of Kiev VIPs to be kept on file, Ukranian writer Viktor, who owns a penguin Misha, discovers he is writing death warrants when the VIPs die with regularity and realizes someone is writing his own obituary. (NoveList)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Factory
In Oyamada's cautionary English-language debut, three recent hires at an inscrutable industrial factory find themselves bewildered by their strange new world. (Kirkus)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Last Empire
Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, investigates the collapse of the Soviet Union, revealing the often brutal political chess game within the Kremlin that ended in President George H. W. Bush's address of the end of the Cold War on Christmas, 1991. (Publishers Weekly)
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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