Galley Giveaway: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has generously offered to send twenty galley (pre-publication) copies of Gina Ochsner’s The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight to readers of Literary License. The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, Ochsner's first novel, was longlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize and is described in a review in the Guardian as “[o]ne part post-Soviet insanity to three parts magical realism.” This novel won’t be published in the U.S. until February, so here’s your chance to grab an early copy.

Book description:

In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there’s a ghost who won’t keep quiet. Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator’s helmet; and Tanya.

Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her observations and her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place which holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created using the tools at hand, from foam to chewing gum, Popsicle sticks to tomato juice. When the museum’s director hears of a mysterious American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks like she might get her chance at a better life, if she can only convince them of the collection’s worth. Enlisting the help of Azade, Olga and even Mircha, Tanya scrambles to save her dreams and her neighbors, and along the way discovers that love may have been waiting in her own courtyard all along.

If this sounds interesting to you, please e-mail me (litlicense AT gmail DOT com) with your name and address (no PO boxes). I'll select twenty winners at random from the qualifying entrants. For those of you who are overachievers, send a brief description of a dream or a journal entry along with your name and address, and I’ll enter you in the drawing twice. Sorry, but the quagmire that is international publishing rights limits this giveaway to those living in the U.S. or Canada.

I will accept entries until midnight on December 18th. Good luck!