Contributor Spoglight: A. Molotkov

“The Most Wonderful White Stockings”, a short story by A. Molotkov, appeared in Issue 29 and can be read here

We’d love to hear more about this story.

The fact that the world has enough resources and skills to ensure everyone’s safety and prosperity, yet it fails to do so, is always on my mind, a problem everyone might be able to solve in a small way. For this story, I was thinking about those most impacted by such disparities. 

What was the most difficult part in writing this story?

Deciding how to properly parcel and deliver the information the reader needs to walk through the story and synthesize the two storylines, each operating in its own time.

Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.

“Under the Skin” by Michel Faber. It’s strange and immensely moving and not usually on the “best novels” lists. For nonfiction, “Voices from Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievich. 

If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?

Although in real life I don’t often share “guy” interests and prefer to converse with non-male interlocutors, still, I’d pick Karl Ove Knausgaard. He sounds like a self-effacing and immensely interesting person. Obviously, I’m only one of millions of people who think so. We may get to it by 2894.  

What are you working on now? What’s next?

I’m working on draft 2 of my novel “A Bag Full of Stones”, a crime drama about hate crime during the Trump years.

Our thanks to Molotkov for taking the time to answer a few questions and share his work. Read Molotkov story, “The Most Wonderful White Stockings”, here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-the-most-wonderful-white-stockings.

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A. Molotkov is an immigrant writer. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence; he has received various fiction and poetry awards and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Triquarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review and most other quality journals. His prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit; he co-edits The Inflectionist Review. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com.