William Echols

This is the best book I've ever published. Full disclosure, this is the only book I've ever published. The title came from a story of how a great Russian love got her own name. It started as a riff in a moleskin she got me on a Thailand holiday years ago. I'm sitting here in Thailand writing this now, 1.5 years after being forced out by COVID-19 -- losing another job, another great love, another life... Before then, I'd spent years in Russia and the post-Soviet space, reading libraries on endless metro rides and taking in all I could from news vistas on life. My own journey began on the side of a nowhere country road that seems as far from me as could be. And yet that's the place that made me. That's the me I've spent years both trying to embrace and undo. You think you're traveling in lines and not circles. Then you see it. Then you write. So that's me, Russian tragedy tinctured with Tennessee fatalism. Likewise, my writing became some strange fusion of Bulgakov and Faulkner, an attempt to depict the fantastically magical in a fantastic and magical way. Many of the places, people and scenes in this novel, which tracks an intrepid young girls journey from a small corner of a Moscow apartment to the edge of eternity, were pulled from my own experiences. It was a way of taking the stuff of my everyday, yanking open the filtering valve, and making something infinite out of what can be gleaned from a medium-sized American life. In some strange way, this is a biography written in metaphor. It's years of Eurasia experienced by a southern dude stepped in southern gothic. the books and music that shaped me, the streets that made me, the people come and gone, in ways both big and small, they are all here. As a writer, I've always clung more closely to Faulkner than Hemingway, for better and for worse. I hope, more than anything, I can make a few people feel what I felt, holed up in the New Laos Paris Hotel, finishing this, listening to Hammock’s Everything and Nothing on repeat before I met the sunset at the Four Junction Vetsara for a beer Laos rendezvous. The process is the reward. The hope that that great beyond you touch in trying to turn your vista on the world into words, can somehow reflect something others have perhaps seen but never been able to express. And however big or small the audience is for this sort of thing, I do hope I find you, just as all of the writers who shaped my life found me. Thanks for listening. William who walks on the shore.