THE RED PASSPORT: Stories

In this promising debut collection set primarily in post-Communist Russia, expatriates and natives alike endeavor to make their way in a new social and economic landscape, often sharing an intense desire for whatever the other possesses: money, freedom, love, family. For Shonk, who spent time in Russia in the late 1990s, Americans abroad can be innocents, interlopers or cultural explorers. In "Kitchen Friends," an American journalist in Moscow who witnesses a trolley bombing by Chechen rebels forms a support group for the survivors, with the private hope that she can confess secrets from her Russian ancestors' dark history. Shonk avidly engages issues of displacement and loss, freedom and constraint. In the haunting "My Mother's Garden," a woman is hard-pressed to convince her mother that the town she refuses to leave is toxic, contaminated by an explosion at a nearby nuclear reactor. "It never ceases to shame me, this fear I have of touching my mother, of carrying the poison in her skin and clothes to my daughter," she thinks. In "Our American," an out-of-work former soldier insinuates himself into an American woman's life in the hopes that she will buy a pair of glasses for his little brother. As in "Honey Month" and "The Conversion," Shonk is at her best examining the lives of Americans whom the natives revere as potential saviors at the same time they dismiss them as frivolous tourists who could never hope to understand life in the former Soviet republic. That tension lends these stories an impressive vitality. Agent, Amy Williams. (Nov.)