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WORK TITLE: Open Mic Night in Moscow
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1987?
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018122069
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Murray, Audrey
Located: Boston (Mass.) Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)
Profession or occupation:
Authors Comedians
Found in: Open mic night in Moscow, 2018: title page (Audrey Murray)
page 3 of jacket (Audrey Murray is a redhead from Boston
who moved to China and became a standup comedian; a
cofounder of Kung Fu Komedy, Audrey was named the
funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine;
she is a contributing writer for Reductress.com and a
regular contributor at Medium.com; her writing has also
appeared in McSweeney's, the Gothamist, China Economic
review, Nowness, and Architizer, and on the wall of her
dad's office; Audrey has appeard on the Lost in America,
Listen to This!, and Shanghai Comedy Corner podcasts, on
CNN and ICS, and in a number of international
publications; she lives in Brooklyn, New York)
Associated language:
eng
PERSONAL
Born c. 1987.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Comedian and author. Kung Fu Komedy, co-founder. Has made appearances on podcasts, including Shanghai Comedy Corner, Listen to This!, and Lost in America.
WRITINGS
Reductress.com, staff writer. Contributor to periodicals, including Architizer, Gothamist, Nowness, and China Economic Review. Also contributor to Medium.com.
SIDELIGHTS
Audrey Murray has become most well known for her work as a comedian. She mainly works within the city of Shanghai, where she helped to launch a comedy club: Kung Fu Komedy. In addition to her stand-up work, Murray has also published numerous pieces of writing throughout various periodicals, such as Architizer, The Gothamist, Nowness, and China Economic Review. She also serves as a contributor to the Medium website, and as one of Reductress.com‘s staff writers. Murray’s media presence extends to television and print outside of the United States. In China, she has featured in City Weekend, That’s Shanghai, Shanghai Daily, and many other publications. She has also taken part in several podcasts pertaining to her line of work.
Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men serves as a a travelogue, detailing Murray’s extensive comedy tour through what was formerly known as Soviet Union. The book is also a memoir of one of the most transformative periods of her life. The book’s narrative kicks off with the end of a relationship. At the time, Murray had been involved with Anton, a man from Belarus, and was dealing with the emotional fallout of their breakup. This event came after Murray traveled to and from the country of China, where she had managed to find a great deal of personal success. Her inability to meet important personal goals now that she was back in the States causes her to feel unsettled. To cope, Murray decided to treat herself to a tour across various Central Asian countries. It is there that she hopes to find a new love for herself that will be much more fulfilling than what she had with Anton. Throughout each visit, Murray takes the time to remark upon each observation and experience. She also takes the time to reflect upon herself. A part of the narrative circles back to Murray’s love life, especially as citizens within the countries she visits find it odd for her to be unmarried and in her late 20’s.
One of the countries Murray visits is Lithuania. There she is unable to find a place to stay; she winds up crashing in several homes until her trip is over. She also visits Kyrgyzstan, where she traverses through the country’s mountain range on horseback and struggles to make sense of the country’s currency system. In the country of Uzbekistan, Murray receives the opportunity to browse the country’s black market and its various goods. She also gets the chance to test out her professional comedy routines on the citizens of Kazakhstan, in spite of some of their cultural restrictions. During her time in Belarus, the very country her ex happens to hail from, Murray tours through Minsk, remarking upon its political and social climate since the fall of the previous Communist government. She also takes a trip to Chernobyl, which still shows effects from the fateful nuclear disaster that took place there. Murray even gets the chance to watch a wedding unfold. Murray closes out the trip with a ride along the Trans-Siberian Highway. “There are some fine moments on these pages, but too often the narrative is forced–a shame given the intrinsic promise of the setup,” said a writer in an issue of Kirkus Reviews. The majority of other reviewers rated the book more positively. “Murray turns what for many women would be a scary solo journey into an exhilarating experience,” remarked one Publishers Weekly contributor. June Sawyers, a reviewer in Booklist, called the book “an unusual, fun, funny, and entertaining travelogue.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2018, June Sawyers, review of Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men, p. 16.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of Open Mic Night in Moscow.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, Rachel Deahl, “Morrow nabs comedic travel memoir,” p. 13; May 28, 2018, review of Open Mic Night in Moscow, p. 89.
ONLINE
Greenburger Associates, http://www.greenburger.com/ (October 22, 2018), author profile.
HarperCollins website, https://www.harpercollins.com/ (October 22, 2018), author profile.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (July 24, 2018), Audrey Murray, “I Stayed at a Hotel Run by Turkmenistan’s Secret Police.”
Audrey Murray is a redhead from Boston who moved to China and became a standup comedian. The co-founder of the Kung Fu Komedy, Audrey was named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. Audrey is a staff writer for Reductress.com and a regular contributor at Medium.com; her writing has also appeared in The Gothamist, China Economic Review, Nowness, Architizer, and on the wall of her dad’s office. Audrey has appeared on the Lost in America, Listen to This!, and Shanghai Comedy Corner podcasts, on CNN and ICS, and in Shanghai Daily, Time Out, Smart Shanghai, That’s Shanghai, and City Weekend. She recently published her first memoir, Open Mic Night in Moscow.
I Stayed at a Hotel Run by Turkmenistan's Secret Police
By Audrey Murray | July 24, 2018 | 3:51pm
Photo by David Kelley
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I Stayed at a Hotel Run by Turkmenistan's Secret Police
Editor’s Note: Audrey Murray is an American writer and comedian whose debut book, Open Mic Night in Moscow, hits shelves today. The book chronicles Murray’s solo travels in the former Soviet Republics, and many of her stories are wild. Check out her essay below to read an anecdote you won’t find in the book.
When I walked into my hotel room in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the first thing I saw was a man in a police uniform scrubbing the toilet.
“Oh, sorry!” I yelped, assuming I had stumbled into the wrong room.
But no! He was just a hotel employee finishing up his work, which he quickly did and then left.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not used to seeing police officers moonlighting as hotel cleaning staff. But isn’t that why we travel? To see things that are different, that make us think, that prompt us to wonder things like, “What is the average salary of a police officer in Turkmenistan?”
audrey murray book cover-min.pngI quickly forgot about this incident, because so much in Turkmenistan had been similarly bizarre. The country was run by a dictator whose portrait hung everywhere you could conceivably hang a photograph. The side of banks! The walls of airplanes! The capital city also boasted the highest density of marble buildings in the world, which seemed like the type of record that had been deliberately pursued rather than subsequently awarded. Most of the city had been razed and rebuilt 20 years earlier, so everything looked almost futuristic—if you could pretend architects 100 years from now wanted to build skyscrapers out of marble. In this context, the steady stream of police officers passing through my hotel lobby didn’t stand out to me.
A few nights later, I was on the phone with an English-speaking tour guide the hotel had called to help translate a problem I was having.
“Well,” the tour guide replied after I finished my story, “I’m not sure what happened, but you will be fine now. Your hotel is run by the police.”
“Wait, what?” I said.
“You didn’t notice, everyone is walking around in police uniforms?”
Now that he mentioned it, I had been a little surprised by the police officer offering turn-down service the night before…and the one taking my breakfast order this morning. But when you travel, you’re so busy keeping an eye out for the new and unexpected, you sometimes put up blinders for anything that registers as remotely familiar. After finding a police officer in my bathroom, I assumed that was normal and then stopped noticing.
Had I been paying more attention, I might have taken in the sign beside the front door that read: Ministry of Internal Affairs Hotel.
I was certainly seeing it now. The name was printed in English on a small plaque that did not explain what the Ministry of Interior Affairs was or why it was running a hotel. But untangling those mysteries would have to wait until I left the country. The government of Turkmenistan keeps such a tight grip on the flow of information that internet access in the country is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs, I later learned, had been a Soviet agency charged with everything from issuing visas to rooting out white-collar crime. For a while, it ran the country’s secret police force. When the KGB broke off into its own independent institution, the Ministry of Internal Affairs kept the regular police. In many post-Soviet countries, that setup remains the same today.
Because it was charged with such a wide range of disparate tasks, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was also responsible for coming up with some of its own budget. To this end, the ministry launched its own hotel and catering business—like if the CIA decided to start a bakery.
The hospitality industry was, in an albeit roundabout away, a logical choice for the organ that ran the secret police. The Ministry was responsible for keeping tabs on the Soviet Union’s foreign visitors, and if you ran the hotels they stayed in, it made spying less of a hassle. Catering, however, seems like more of a stretch. But maybe the Ministry had a killer recipe for pulled pork or made the best hollandaise sauce in the Eastern Bloc.
We’ve all heard stories of someone who opened a restaurant because she loved cooking only to realize she did not love running a business. By the 1950s, the Ministry of Internal Affairs started to divest itself of many of its food-and-beverage holdings. But it kept its hotels, ostensibly because it was a budget-friendly way to house its own traveling employees.
Perhaps that’s another reason I hadn’t stopped to question the cops folding laundry; by this point, the police in Turkmenistan had been running hotels for half a century. None of the people pushing service carts or opening the door for me saw anything strange about their particular beat. And that’s the other thing we do when we travel: we take our cues on what’s “normal” from the people around us.
On the morning of my departure, a young uniformed officer helped me a hail a taxi to the airport. In that moment, I wished I had an internet connection so that I could Google, “How much do you tip a secret police bellhop?”
Audrey Murray is a redhead from Boston who moved to China and became a standup comedian. A co-founder of Kung Fu Komedy, Audrey was named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. She is a contributing writer for Reductress.com and a regular contributor at Medium.com; her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, The Gothamist, China Economic Review, Nowness, Architizer and on the wall of her dad’s office.
Audrey Murray’s debut memoir Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men will be published by William Morrow in July 2018. Comprised of hilarious stories from her nine-month solo tour of the former Soviet Union, the book includes chapters like “Ruining a Baby’s Birthday Party in Tajikistan” and “Visiting the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor That Exploded: My Trip to Ukraine,” with a starred rating system for her experiences.
Audrey is a comedian, creator of the Greenpoint Comedy Night at Word Bookstore, and a co-founder of China’s first stand-up comedy club, Kung Fu Komedy. She lives in Brooklyn and works in Shanghai (the commute is terrible).
Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men
Publishers Weekly. 265.22 (May 28, 2018): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men
Audrey Murray. Morrow, $24.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-06-282329-8
Comedian Murray takes readers on an entertaining journey through destinations in the former U.S.S.R. that aren't on a typical tourist's must-see list, such as Tajikistan, Chernobyl, and Siberia. "By the time I turned twenty-eight, I'd become so obsessed with the countries that gave us beets, Dostoyevsky and websites for streaming pirated movies that it seemed perfectly logical to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union and trying to learn Russian," she muses in her introduction. In witty stories, she chronicles her adventures negotiating stand-up comedy routines in front of Kazakhs (she has to perform in socks since no shoes are allowed inside), haggling taxi fares in Kyrgyzstan (she confused the exchange rate and was embarrassed when she realized they were charging her $3 rather than $70), and sleeping in a yurt with dive-bombing moths. The author's travels take her on rickety prop planes in Tajikistan, on the Trans-Siberian Highway, and in one particularly horrifying scene, a near-kidnapping in Turkmenistan by a human trafficker posing as a taxi driver. She visits her ex-boyfriend Anton's homeland of Belarus, which purportedly has the world's highest number of police officers per capita, and moves on to couch-surfing in Lithuania. Murray turns what for many women would be a scary solo journey into an exhilarating experience. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 89. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638856/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f00ec388. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638856
Murray, Audrey: OPEN MIC NIGHT IN MOSCOW
Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Murray, Audrey OPEN MIC NIGHT IN MOSCOW Morrow/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $24.99 7, 24 ISBN: 978-0-06-282329-8
A sporadically funny book by stand-up comedian and world traveler Murray.
Unlucky in love and ready to expand her horizons, the author decided to travel through the former Soviet Union to see what she could see and maybe meet a nice guy. "If you're interested in a brief history," she writes of the setting of her quest, "I highly recommend Wikipedia, but the condensed version is basically: communism, Stalin, is Anastasia still alive but living in New Jersey?" Sadly, the jokes don't get much better--but then, as she writes candidly, "mediocre jokes are always a great way to get out of giving an honest response to a question that's complicated and difficult to answer." Murray's travels took her into some interesting and little-visited corners of the former Soviet empire--e.g., Belarus, where she finds positive things to say about the generally unloved city of Minsk, where, at least, people police up their cigarette butts even as their fearless leader mourns the collapse of communism. Sagely, she writes of a Belarusian man she's met, "as long as [Belarusian dictator] Lukashenko keeps trying to bring back the past, people like Zhenya won't have a future." Along the way, she turns in some smart if glancing observations on the places she visited: Chernobyl, she writes, has been set-designed to emphasize the general bad vibes attendant in a nuclear catastrophe, while Samarkand is "like Disneyland," its famed old corner rebuilt for the tourist trade. Too frequently, such settings are just set pieces for snark. Of the ritual orchestration of an Uzbek wedding, Murray tosses off the aside that "certainly a lot of people get nervous on their wedding days, even Brooklyn couples who've been living together for over a decade and already have three children." One wonders what a sardonic traveler like P.J. O'Rourke might have made of the same ingredients.
There are some fine moments on these pages, but too often the narrative is forced--a shame given the intrinsic promise of the setup.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Murray, Audrey: OPEN MIC NIGHT IN MOSCOW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294068/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aad6fcec. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294068
Morrow nabs comedic travel memoir
Rachel Deahl
Publishers Weekly. 264.22 (May 29, 2017): p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Audrey Murray, a comedian, sold a memoir about her travels in the former Soviet Union to William Morrow. Emma Brodie bought world rights to the currently untitled essay collection on an exclusive submission from Sanford J. Greenburger's Stephanie Delman. The book, slated for summer 2018, will, Delman said, feature humorous stories about "the author's passion for the former Soviet Union and the nine months she spent traveling there alone." Murray hosts the Green point Comedy Night at Word Bookstore and is a cofounder of China's first stand-up comedy club, Kung Fu Komedy.
Caption: Murray
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Deahl, Rachel. "Morrow nabs comedic travel memoir." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 13. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500653/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ed9ad5e6. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500653
Open Mic Night in Moscow and Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men
June Sawyers
Booklist. 114.19-20 (June 1, 2018): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Open Mic Night in Moscow and Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men.
By Audrey Murray.
July 2018. 416p. Morrow, $24.99 (9780062823298). 910.
You may not know Murray, but she does have the distinction of being named the funniest person in Shanghai by City Weekend magazine. After "conquering" China, returning home, and failing to settle down, the comedian set her sights on the 15 republics of the former Soviet Union and made it to 11 of them. Murray is a delightful and, yes, hilarious travel companion. You're with her all the way: as she rides a horse in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan or experiences a terrifying flight over Tajikistan. Whenever a male asks her why, at age 28, she is still single (which happens quite often), she usually blurts out that she is engaged and her fiance is arriving in (insert wherever she happens to be) the next day. Meanwhile, her other adventures include touring the black markets of Uzbekistan, camping in Turkmenistan, spending an afternoon in Chernobyl and Halloween in Belarus, and couch-surfing in the Baltics before embarking on an epic journey on the TransSiberian Railway. An unusual, fun, funny, and entertaining travelogue.--June Sawyers
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sawyers, June. "Open Mic Night in Moscow and Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men." Booklist, 1 June 2018, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546287411/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3566b594. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546287411