Meklina's writing skill in English is astonishing. Ursula K. Le Guin Meklina's writing is metamorphic, tangling comedy, irony, tragedy and beauty together. Alicia Ostriker In these startling and engaging stories, Meklina presents the familiar and the unfamiliar through bright beams of language, and wonderful flourishes of narrative craft. Her literary eye is one that wisely observes and wisely embroiders simultaneously, and I came away ready to think about everyone I know in wiser ways. Rod Val Moore, author of Igloo Among Palms (Iowa Fiction Award) Meklina's short prose portrays with jarring realism the gritty street life of big cities, and the inner Angst of people on the edge, through the naive perspective of immigrant narrators and helpful fools. The characters are frequently the quintessential American oddities or expatriates, people who nonetheless carry the taste of every-day reality in large 21st Century cities anywhere. These narratives weave together the stream-of-experience images that, in a few hundred words, say more about city life and daily struggle than some books of as many pages. D.A. Rich, author of The Tsar's Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia