Pavel Lembersky

This story spans borders as we follow Ukrainian-born Mark Neider on a series of adventures and misadventures in the United States and Russia in the early 1990s. From crime to constitutional crisis and film directors to romantic entanglements, this tale engages readers from beginning to end. Mark Neider, a young Ukrainian-born American IT specialist, finds himself in crime-ridden Yeltsin’s Russia, hot on the trail of wheeler dealers who swindled him out of a small fortune back in New York. In Moscow, Mark survives an aborted coup in October 1993 and encounters a mysterious stranger who claims to have had a hand in the recent constitutional crisis. Tasha, Mark’s Moscow daredevil girlfriend, helps him retrieve the money at a significant body count, but Mark is only allowed to leave the country with 10K, a mere fraction of the loot now in his possession. Tasha and her film scholar aunt hatch a plan. Tasha’s aunt keeps the money while her wealthy Chicagoan ex disburses the equivalent amount to Mark in return for Mark’s interviewing the elderly sister of Greg Davis, an American film director who is the subject of Tasha’s aunt’s scholarly interest. But there’s more than meets the eye to Greg Davis’s sister who takes Mark on a journey he may or may not return from.

This story spans borders as we follow Ukrainian-born Mark Neider on a series of adventures and misadventures in the United States and Russia in the early 1990s. From crime to constitutional crisis and film directors to romantic entanglements, this tale engages readers from beginning to end. Mark Neider, a young Ukrainian-born American IT specialist, finds himself in crime-ridden Yeltsin’s Russia, hot on the trail of wheeler dealers who swindled him out of a small fortune back in New York. In Moscow, Mark survives an aborted coup in October 1993 and encounters a mysterious stranger who claims to have had a hand in the recent constitutional crisis. Tasha, Mark’s Moscow daredevil girlfriend, helps him retrieve the money at a significant body count, but Mark is only allowed to leave the country with 10K, a mere fraction of the loot now in his possession. Tasha and her film scholar aunt hatch a plan. Tasha’s aunt keeps the money while her wealthy Chicagoan ex disburses the equivalent amount to Mark in return for Mark’s interviewing the elderly sister of Greg Davis, an American film director who is the subject of Tasha’s aunt’s scholarly interest. But there’s more than meets the eye to Greg Davis’s sister who takes Mark on a journey he may or may not return from.

Pacific Northwest fictions feature Tom Spanbauer recovering from illness under the trees on his street, Sean Davis driving for the first time, bringing his father home from a bar at 0 dark thirty, and Michael Sage Ricci finding the true nature of superheroes. Essayist David Hapgood watches his bus drift apart on the mountains of Morocco. Pacific Northwest poets include Christopher Luna, Brenda Taulbee, Coleman Stevenson, and surrealist JM Reed. Internationally, fiction and screenplay writer Pavel Lembersky tells us a love story, film scholar Janina Bocksch explores movement in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, film scholar Sergio Morera explores Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice. We round out with collages from Bosnia Hercegovina, Cross+Fikaris illustrating the history of cannabis in Australia, and poems from Russia, Morocco, Iran, Lithuania, Albania and Switzerland. Cover art by Australian watercolourist Graham Willoughby. Pan-lingual Gobshite Quarterly, where Paul Krassner meets V nus Khoury-Ghata, is my favorite source for Hungarian fiction that reads like a song ("Hogy jaj. jaj. jaj. semirol semmi fogalma nines..."). Here English language poems, short stories, and "reasoned rants" nervously traverse a dark alley, past hipster Arabs, dangerous Czechs, Spanish cantoras.... - Chris Dodge, Utne Magazine I did two books and many more multilingual magazine projects with Gobshite Quarterly. They're linguistic treasures. They're language-discoverers and -savers. Croatian, German, Serbian, English, Tagalog, Icelandic, Russian, Spanish, Bengali in my case. Being human is to speak, hear, write in languages, & Gobshite Quarterly makes the world more human. - Christoph Keller, winner of the 2020 Alemannic Literary PrizeGobshite Quarterly has been invaluable in introducing Croatian writers to the United States. Documentary, imaginative accounting, recounting, warning, horror, daily moments, textures of continuing life: writing emerging from the war, writing the world had to see. Gobshite published it, in a dizzying number of languages, and continues to do so. - Julienne Busic, Croatian writer and translatorI turn to Gobshite to discover and add to my research and study of PNW authors. It is go-to. But Gobshite Quarterly is much more than a regional journal. Gobshite's attention and curation and far-reaching includes the best international poets, broadening my horizons issue after issue. It is go-to. - Jeff Sargent, poet/reviewer Now more than ever, Gobshite's ambitious, ingenious, and unexpected multilingual publications serve as an antidote to the ever more toxic xenophobia which has been corrupting our culture since 2016. These issues persistently remind American readers that there's a larger world out there than the one they live in. - Madison Smartt Bell