I was born in 1976, in Riga, a city Germany and Russia took turns curating for the last 500 years: marble Lenins pointing at gothic spires. My parents encouraged personal responsibility to such an extent that, at the age of thirteen, I transferred myself to another school and informed them of that development only post factum. The Pushkin Lyceum was an experiment in bombarding kids with an almost Victorian curriculum of humanities (Latin, ethics, intro-level psychology and linguistics in 9th grade) just to see what happens. What happened was, first of all, a terrible female-to-male ratio; I represented one-third of the men in my graduating class. The other two boys formed a team that, as of this writing, cranks out Brett Easton Ellis-like bestsellers in Russia. In 1990, I started writing for Soviet Youth, a daily newspaper that had just discovered bikini photos and UFO canards, and was enjoying a circulation of over two million as a result. My first publication was an interview with a fashionable writer, who did not expect to be interrogated by a thirteen-year-old and dropped his guard to say some extremely unflattering things about the Communist Party. The interview was immediately picked up by Radio Free Europe, thus making me a full-blown dissident. Luckily, the Soviet Union soon collapsed, no doubt under the weight of that interview; within months, my parents were getting harassed on the street (as Jews, by Russians) and on the job (as Russians, by Latvians). The family, who had previously considered emigration vaguely immoral, alighted for the U.S.

There followed two sad years in Cleveland, spent working at McDonalds and a public library, translating The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner into Russian, failing high-school math, and shipping awful essays about all of the above back to the old country. Finally, I took up film studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. My English was not nearly sufficient for prose, so I tried dramaturgy instead. To my surprise, the resulting play about Orson Welles's radio years was actually staged by a local theater, where it ran for the record-busting two weekends. For the rest of my college years, I was a "playwright," a strange ruse on my part (I never had any interest in the form) but a profitable one (it paid for at least a year of tuition).

Within two weeks of graduation, I moved to New York City and began an extended spell of job-hopping. From 1998 to 2004, I wrote music listings for the Village Voice, bluffed my way through a very brief career as a restaurant critic at Time Out New York, and anchored a news show at NTV, a Russian television network. In 2005, after a disastrous detour into small business, I happily returned to journalism, first to NBC as a news producer and then to New York Magazine as a contributing editor. My first novel, Ground Up, will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on July 21, 2009. I am also working on a picture book about unsung icons of Soviet design for Rizzoli; it should be out in 2010. In case you need me for anything literature-related, I'm lucky enough to be represented by Amanda "Binky" Urban at ICM. Last but absolutely not least, I write songs.