Notes from Cyberground: Mikhail Iossel with Phillip Lopate

Join us as Mikhail Iossel discusses his new book, Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling, with award-winning essayist, fiction writer, film critic, poet, and teacher Phillip Lopate. Iossel’s book brings together his most trenchant and enduring political and cultural commentary since the 2016 US presidential election. From a youth spent in the USSR to a life remade in the USA, Iossel shares the brunt of this experience on Facebook, where thousands follow his blistering posts on Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia, and his pensive, eerily timely recollections of life under totalitarianism. Notes from Cyberground brings together a choice selection of Iossel’s aphorisms, ranging from a few words to a few hundred words. Each chapter covers a month from Election Day 2016 to October 2018. Even when comical, this gem of a book is dead serious. It will bring solace to anyone who feels distressed by today’s surreal politics.

“Mikhail Iossel is an intense and thoughtful force for decency in the world.” —George Saunders

“Long after the present rulers are deposed, this treasury of invective will deserve to be read on its literary merits, just as we still read Pope’s and Swift’s satires of their contemporaries. The comparisons between Putin and Trump are especially priceless, as are Iossel’s portrayals of his/our liberal befuddlement.” —Phillip Lopate