A review of Sentence by Mikhail Iossel

Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek

Sentence: Stories
by Mikhail Iossel
Linda Leith Publishing
ISBN: 9781773901756, Aug 2025, 190 pages

In Mikhail Iossel’s Sentence, the Russian writer uses creative plays on autofiction. The 38 stories are delivered in a fast-paced style, each mostly consisting of a single, long sentence. The spare form displays an aptitude of the writer’s assimilation of the English language and his willingness along with an admirable adventurousness to bend form. Iossel emigrated to the United States in 1986 and began writing in English soon after his arrival. Now a writing instructor in the United States, Iossel’s literary journey shows us the utility and the intricacies of language itself and Sentence thrives in this context.

Iossel stated in an interview with the journal, Fiction Writers Review: “If I were to define my writing, I would say that it’s writing in Russian but in English. It’s Russian sentences in English. But I can only speak English in the correct way.” And it’s this type of clever response to circumstance that I enjoyed in Iossel’s writing. Throughout his stories, Iossel demonstrates a deep reverence for language—both his native tongue and his adopted English—as he navigates the complex terrain of cultural and linguistic displacement and movement across ideologies even. This foundation of a language that was a mystery itself and simultaneously romanticized by Iossel from an early age provides a powerful undertone.

Sentence relies so much on Iossel’s biography and his Russian roots having lived with the blatant distortion of truth so widespread in Cold War-era Russia with its authoritarian, oligarchic culture. The stories in Sentence thrive in the midst of foreclosed freedoms, a confining environment but never without a sense of curiosity and interest. Sentence may forego periods for the brief spaces allowed by commas, but the narratives are well-structured, darkly humorous, nostalgic, investigative in regards to the surreality of trauma, survivor guilt and paranoia.

The stories rooted in personal history, built through layered imagery, and the prose frequently adopt poetic cadences. The text switches up the format too with brief stories less than one page mixing in with longer sentences. The brief stories are cleverly labyrinthine and ultimately land with a philosophical quality which made me consider parallels to the work of the writer Lydia Davis. (I had to remind myself throughout Sentence that I had just spent the past fifteen minutes reading one sentence.) The form worked effectively and avoided devolving into mere gimmick. After a while I forgot completely about the manipulation of grammar, which also made me consider how one can get used to anything. Maybe that’s the point, I wondered? Again was this a purposeful aim meant to evoke a connection to the insidious nature of authoritarian regimes and ultimately the exhilaration of being released from impositions on one’s freedoms? It was an interesting subtext to consider.

In one story, there is a girl that arises from a dream never to be seen again but has a name the narrator cannot forget. Brief sentences about what is reality and what is unimaginable. There are moments when reading Sentence which reconfigured my sense of reality then beautifully detailed reminiscences of St. Petersburg from Iossel’s childhood float in with a dry wit phrasing to ground the narrative:

OK, moving on… and the massive old and indeed totally Dostoyevskean apartment tenements, no matter who that fellow Dostoyevsky may have been, and… and the long-accustomed-to stench from the nearby Obvodny Canal, the city’s main open-air sewage artery, with its frighteningly stagnant, dead water, and, uh… let me think, I can’t quite re-inhabit my long-nonexistent seven-year-old self right on the spot, on such a short notice, can I… yes, and the simmering dusky milky light of mosquito-ridden summer nights, no more mentioning Dostoyevsky, I promise, I don’t like him as a writer to begin with

Iossel offers a range of emotion. His voice is opinionated, often a stream of consciousness in flow. The writing is declarative and emphatic, oscillating from a core of gratitude and a compassion for life even at its bleakest moments:

I am grateful for the people I love and for the people who love me in my life; and I am grateful for knowing that people who love me and all of us do so because it is they who are good, not me, not us; and I am grateful for having the capacity to feel and to feel alive

With Sentence Iossel’s dismantling and reconstruction of form showed me that fiction can be more expansive and encompass diverse truths. The stories will make you question the truths you accept in your own life; and as Iossel’s work suggests (as I borrow a bit of his wordplay), sometimes what you thought you didn’t need is exactly what you find.