Debut Author Emily Rubin Gets to the Heart and Soul of Her Images

STALINA
(Amazon Encore, January 2011)

Emily Rubin

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Length: About 23 minutes

Emily Rubin

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At the age of 50-plus, Emily Rubin has at last found her place in the publishing world. Her debut novel, STALINA (Amazon Encore; January 18, 2011; $13.95 print; $7.99 digital), was discovered and, at last, published this year. Here the Pushcart Prize nominee talks about her publishing journey and about the inspiration for her first novel.

In STALINA, Emily Rubin exposes the very heart of the complicated Russian psyche, the story of a fearless Russian woman’s determination to reconcile the pain of the past and find happiness in a new world.

Inspired from real-life events garnered from an Oral History class the author taught at a community college in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, STALINA is a daring twist on the timeless immigrant’s tale. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Stalina Folskaya’s homeland is a bankrupt country filled with nothing more than lost dreams. In an effort to find a better life, Stalina embarks for America, leaving behind the painful past and her elderly mother in St. Petersburg. Though trained as a chemist in Russia, Stalina, named after Stalin himself, takes a job as a maid at a “short-stay” motel on the outskirts of Hartford, Connecticut. When she convinces her boss to let her redecorate the seedy rooms into fantasy settings, business booms, further fueling Stalina’s resolve to take control of her own destiny.

Emily is known throughout New York City’s literary scene as producer for the notable reading series Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose held in laundromats throughout the country.

A native New Yorker and graduate of Bard College, Rubin is a long-time resident of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She is a local broadcast professional serving as a producer and television stage manager at MTV, History Channel, A&E, NBC, PBS, Fox News, and Bravo, among other networks. Rubin’s fiction has been published in the Red Rock Review, Confrontations, and HAPPY. She is a past nominee for the Pushcart Prize for her short story “Birthday 1953.: In 2005, she began producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading series that takes place in Laundromats around the United States. She divides her time between New York City and Columbia County, New York with her husband, Leslie, and their dog, Sebastian.

–Doris Booth