Contemporary Authors

• The Gray House - 2017 AmazonCrossing,

• Wikipedia -

  Mariam Petrosyan
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Jump to: navigation, search
  Mariam Petrosyan

  Born
  10 August 1969 (age 48)
  Yerevan, Soviet Armenia
  Occupation
  Novelist, cartoonist
  Nationality
  Armenian
  Genre
  Magic Realism
  Literary movement
  Modernism, Postmodernism
  Notable works
  The Gray House (2009)
  Notable awards
  Russian Big Book
  Spouse
  Artashes Stamboltsan
  Mariam Petrosyan (Armenian: Մարիամ Պետրոսյան, born 10 August 1969) is an Armenian painter, cartoonist and Russian-language novelist. She is most well known as the author of the award-winning novel The Gray House (2009), translated into eight languages.

  Contents  [hide] 
  1
  Biography
  2
  The Gray House
  3
  References
  4
  External links

  Biography[edit]
  Mariam Petrosyan was born in 1969 in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. After finishing an art college she became a cartoonist at the Studio of Armenfilm. Later she moved to Moscow to work at Soyuzmultfilm, but came back to Yerevan in 1995 and returned to Armenfilm. She worked there until 2007.
  Mariam is married to Armenian graphic artist Artashes Stamboltsyan. They have two children. She is a great-granddaughter of the painter Martiros Saryan.
  The Gray House[edit]
  Her first novel, The Gray House (Russian: «Дом, в котором...», literally: The House, In Which...), tells of a boarding school for disabled children and was published in Russian in 2009, becoming a bestseller. It was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize in 2010 and received several awards and nominations, among them the 2009 Russian Prize for the best book in Russian by an author living abroad.
  The book has been translated into Italian (La casa del tempo sospeso, 2011), Hungarian (Abban a házban, 2012), Polish (Dom, w którym..., 2013), Spanish (La casa de los otros, 2015), French (La Maison dans laquelle, 2016), Czech (Dům, ve kterém, 2016), and Macedonian (Домот во кој..., 2016) languages.
  The worldwide English edition came out on 25 April 2017, from AmazonCrossing.[1] Selling rights for Danish, Latvian and Norwegian translations were also announced by Petrosyan's literary agency.[2]
  Excerpts from the novel (in English translation by Andrew Bromfield[3]) were narrated by Stephen Fry in the film Russia's Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin.[4]
  The only other book by the author to the date is a short fairy tale, The Dog Who Could Fly (Russian: «Сказка про собаку, которая умела летать», 2014).

• Amazon -

  Mariam Petrosyan was born in 1969 in Yerevan, Armenia. In 1989 she graduated with a degree in applied arts and worked in the animation department of Armenfilm movie studio. In 1992 she moved to Moscow to work at Soyuzmultfilm studio, then returned to Yerevan in 1995.
  The Gray House is Petrosyan’s debut novel. After working on it for eighteen years, she published it in Russia in 2009, and it became an instant bestseller, winning several of the year’s top literary awards, including the Russian Prize for the best book by a Russian author living abroad. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Lithuanian.
  In interviews Petrosyan frequently says that readers should not expect another book from her, since, for her, The Gray House is not merely a book but a world she knew and could visit, and she doesn’t know another one.
  Petrosyan is married to Armenian artist Artashes Stamboltsyan. They have two children.

• ELKOST Intl. Literary Agency Website - http://www.elkost.com/authors/petrosyan

  Mariam Petrosyan
  ELKOST Intl. literary agency handles world translation rights in THE HOUSE THAT… by MARIAM PETROSYAN
  2010 Russian Student Booker Award
  2010 Russian Literary Award for the best novel
  2010 NazBest Literary Award nominee
  2010 Russian Booker shortlist
  2009 Big Book Russian National Literary Prize readers' open voting bronze-winner
  

   
  Mariam Petrosyan (1969, Armenia) is not a professional writer. She studied graphic design and for twenty years has worked on animated films. As she explains, years ago she began writing this book, the drawings came first, and then the characters began to come to life on the pages.
  She states that she never intended to publish the work, but that she wrote it for herself. Friends of hers brought the manuscript to the publisher and then she made herself bring the work to completion. Now with the book in publication she acknowledges a feeling of emptiness inside herself, and writing the sequel.
  Books   ( 1 Article )
  Media reviews   ( 15 Articles )
  Sample translations   ( 2 Articles )
  Interviews   ( 2 Articles )

Petrosyan, Mariam: THE GRAY HOUSE

(Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Petrosyan, Mariam THE GRAY HOUSE AmazonCrossing (Children's Fiction) $10.99 4, 25 ISBN: 978-1-5039-4281-3
Petrosyan's award-winning debut novel, translated from Russian, is a vividly imagined tale of epic proportions.The House, which sits overlooked on the outskirts of town, is a boarding school for disabled children and teenagers. Isolated from the Outsides, the residents of the House are enmeshed in a carefully constructed world of unspoken rules and thorny histories. The meandering narrative moves back and forth in time, alternating narrators and tenses, to paint an intricate portrait of a social order that appears ultimately dictated by an unknown force, understood by its inhabitants to be the House itself. When student deaths begin to pile up over the course of the narrative, readers can identify with newcomer Smoker as he tries to understand the mysteries of the House and the source of its power over its inhabitants. Petrosyan has created a painstakingly three-dimensional, fully inhabited world. Slowly but surely, the plot reveals itself through a gradual process of unraveling, leading readers down a sprawling rabbit hole of intrigue and mysteries, accompanied by a dizzying array of quirky denizens. Petrosyan's prose is wildly imaginative and beautifully wrought, overflowing in Machkasov's translation with rich sensory details that combine with an offbeat sense of humor to form a fully realized world. This dense, heady tale should be enjoyed by seasoned readers of literary fiction and magical realism. Although it is being marketed in the U.S. for teens, it will perhaps find its most natural audience among adult readers. An impressive--and impressively massive--feat of imagination and translation. (Magical realism. 14-adult)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Petrosyan, Mariam: THE GRAY HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485105160&it=r&asid=e55b7137f637816bb1c79271a6f6119e. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105160

The Gray House

264.9 (Feb. 27, 2017): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Gray House
Mariam Petrosyan, trans. from the Russian by Yuri Machkasov. AmazonCrossing, $10.99
trade paper (734p) ISBN 978-1-5039-4281-3
The titular house in Armenian writer Petrosyan's massively absorbing and sometimes frustrating novel is a boarding school for physically disabled students on the outskirts of an unnamed town. The distinctly supernatural house is a three-story "gigantic beehive" made up of dormitories, classrooms, and other less formal spaces, each with their own set of rules and secrets. The students--known only by nicknames bestowed upon them by their peers--divide themselves into tribes based on their assigned dormitories, and these close-knit groups work to uncover the mysteries of the house and its history while also trying to avoid war between the factions. Rich with startling details and vivid worldbuilding, the novel unfolds in alternating points of view as characters learn about how the house operates differently from the largely unknown world outsides and collectively wonder about what will happen after graduation, when they must reenter a world that they no longer know. Much of the novel consists of the students telling fairy tales to each other about the "Outsides" and what they know of the house's past and their own place within it, building a personal mythology as a way of explaining the strange world in which they have found themselves. The witty dialogue, sharply drawn characters, and endlessly unfolding riddle of the house's true nature buoy a narrative that sometimes seems as meandering as the hallways of the house itself, a series of entertaining anecdotes rather than a cohesive whole. But the intellectually and emotionally rewarding conclusion confirms this fantasy novel's undeniable power. (Apr.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Gray House." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671138&it=r&asid=3e0c1030cbbeb32a0aa34ffe452ba67e. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485671138

"Petrosyan, Mariam: THE GRAY HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485105160&asid=e55b7137f637816bb1c79271a6f6119e. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "The Gray House." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485671138&asid=3e0c1030cbbeb32a0aa34ffe452ba67e. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

• Russia Beyond
  https://www.rbth.com/arts/literature/2017/05/23/book-review-the-gray-house_765271
  Word count: 766

  Book review: School for disabled kids becomes the site of a mystery
  Arts & Living May 23, 2017 Phoebe Taplin special to RBTH

  The Gray House (Translated by Yuri Machkasov; AmazonCrossing, April, 2017)
  Amazon.com
  In “The Gray House”, superbly translated by Yuri Machkasov, Mariam Petrosyan’s rips up the rule book, presenting a highly original and energetic novel that will give the reader an insight into a world that is seldom presented.
  AmazonCrossing, April 25, 2017Mariam Petrosyan’s The Gray House was a sensation on the Russian literary scene when it was published in 2009, and in 2013 the author was included in the documentary “Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin”, hosted by Stephen Fry. Petrosyan was featured along with five other contemporary writers “who came from one of the world great literary traditions. And what they are doing with it is new and their own.”
  Vibrant Gray House
  In the mid-1990s an Armenian graphic artist called Mariam Petrosyan worked as a painter at the Soyuzmultfilm animation studio and gave friends in Moscow a manuscript of her then-unfinished novel, written in Russian. Passed lovingly from hand to hand, the book finally found its way to a publisher in 2009. The following year the novel, called The Gray House in English, won several awards and began to attract a cult following and has since inspired postgrad dissertations, Instagram pages full of fan-art and long signing queues. This year it has been published in English.
  Petrosyan has refused to write a sequel or sell the film rights to this complex and unusual epic, whose 700 pages are full of vibrant characters. The Gray House is a school for students with disabilities. The teenagers use wheelchairs or prosthetics and the leader of the house is blind. There is nothing sentimental or tokenistic about these wisecracking young adults, sporting dreadlocks, tattoos and a murderball-style physicality. Different characters narrate an overlapping series of events, most of them known only by a pseudonym or “nick”.
  We first experience the Gray House through the eyes of Smoker, a relative outsider, who moves from the conformist “Pheasants” dormitory to the anarchic “Fourth”. Alternating with this are flashback chapters (helpfully designated by a change of font) in which, confusingly, several people have different, earlier nicknames. Petrosyan excels at the fresh details that make up individual personalities. One inscrutable youngster likes “seltzer, stray dogs, striped awnings, round stones…” and hates “white clothing, lemons, … the scent of chamomile.”
  Mariam Petrosyan. Source: Grigory Sysoyev / RIA Novosti
  The number of narrators proliferates, including the appealing figure of Tabaqui the Jackal, whose entries provide a kind of authorial manifesto: “I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than sometime-later.” Tabaqui embodies Petrosyan’s inventiveness, her resistance to chronology, her penchant for false trails and signs. The House, it emerges, has hidden dimensions. Petrosyan plays with space and time, introducing parallel loops of narrative and a weird “Forest” with its own impenetrable laws.
  Polyphonic narrative
  The novel is full of references, classical (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky) and pop-cultural (Bowie, Bruce Lee). Sometimes the varying characters of the different dormitories and the mentions of dragons and basilisks make it all feel like a Soviet version of JK Rowling’s Hogwarts. Elsewhere, there are echoes of Lord of the Flies in the rival gangs of ungovernable boys, face painting, and fires. Songs and fairy tales are all part of the textual patchwork, along with all kinds of allusions, from Hieronymus Bosch to the Kama Sutra. Repeated epigraphs from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark confirm the influence of nonsense poetry.
  Petrosyan’s stylistic quirks match her flamboyant protagonists; one gothic-sounding sentence, rich in sub-clauses, lasts a page and a half. Yuri Machkasov’s translation is a herculean feat. The slightly colorless Gray House has replaced the book’s intriguing, original title, The House, in which…, but Machkasov has captured the novel’s poetic richness. Petrosyan makes fun of some of her own metaphors – smashed watches, melting snowmen – as she investigates a series of liminal states: twilight, adolescence, the borders of sanity.
  Individuality is a central theme, producing a postmodern symphony of narrative voices. "Everyone chooses his own House. It is we who make it interesting or dull…" explains a student called Sphinx. Later Sphinx tells his girlfriend (one of the novel’s relatively rare female characters): "Whoever’s telling the story creates the story. No single story can describe reality exactly the way it was." 

• Global Literature in Libraries Initiative
  https://glli-us.org/2017/05/01/review-the-gray-house-by-mariam-petrosyan/
  Word count: 360

  REVIEW: The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan
  Posted on May 1, 2017 by Rachel Hildebrandt

  Mariam Petrosyan’s award-winning epic The Gray House is a sprawling yarn of a story, a coming-of-age tale wrapped up in threads of magical realism and mystery. The eponymous House is a boarding school for disabled children and teenagers, which sits on the outskirts of town, ignored by the people of the Outsides. Its residents, a colorful and quirky array of youth with a never-ending supply of nicknames and shenanigans, construct for themselves an inner-world of games, rituals and intrigues that is independent of the Outsides and the adult world. Relative newcomer Smoker serves as a stand-in for the reader as he attempts to navigate the complex social structure of the House’s various factions and unwritten rules, piecing together bits and pieces of its mysteries, which are as twisted and meandering as the corridors of the House itself. As the narrative switches backwards and forwards in time, alternating narrators and dislodging perspectives, the intrigues of the plot slowly begin to unravel themselves to reveal the sinister truths at the core of the House and its inhabitants.
  Petrosyan’s world-building is astonishing in its imagination and its surfeit of rich, vivid imagery and detail. To step into this book is to enter a fully realized, multi-dimensional world of her creation, full of intimate details and a cast of unforgettable characters whose eccentric and often humorous ways beget a sense of familiarity borne of Petrosyan’s confident and unconventional prose. Yuri Machkasov’s intricate translation of this literary tour de force is an impressive feat, and a delight to English-language sensibilities.
  This massive undertaking of a book is not for the faint of heart, and will likely best be appreciated by lovers of literary fiction and magical realism in the vein of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Wholly original and linguistically rewarding, it will charm and reward patient readers with its heady revelations and profound insights.
  The Gray House
  Mariam Petrosyan
  Translated from the Russian by Yuri Machkasov
  2017, Amazon Crossing
  ISBN: 9781503942813
  By Jenny Zbrizher

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2017/04/23/The-Gray-House-Miriam-Petrosyan/stories/201704300017
  Word count: 691

  'The Gray House' is an epic 800 page debut by Mariam Petrosyan
  Leigh Anne Focareta

  6:00 AM Apr 23, 2017

  Speculative fiction isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Tea drinkers, however, will happily drown in Mariam Petrosyan’s oversized samovar of a novel, “The Gray House.” Written over a period of 18 years and clocking in at 800 pages, the novel practically dares readers to step inside and stay awhile.

  "THE GRAY HOUSE"
  By Mariam Petrosyan
  AmazonCrossing ($15.95).

  Those who rise to the challenge will find a carefully constructed narrative that borrows heavily from “Lord of the Flies” by way of “House of Leaves” and “Peter Pan.” The lost boys in question live in a facility for children and teens with disabilities. Dumped there by families who can’t — or won’t — care for them, the children are loosely supervised by a handful of indifferent teachers and counselors under the half-hearted leadership of an eccentric principal.
  Left to their own devices, the boys create an intricate culture for themselves, complete with tribes, nicknames and an ethical code called “the Law,” which is obeyed without question. This culture revolves around the House itself, and its mythology — which spans decades — is so intricate that even careful readers might miss important details. Whether you’re willing to read it again for nuance depends entirely on whether you have accepted the House ... or, perhaps, whether the House has accepted you.
  Ms. Petrosyan is an Armenian who writes in Russian. Her greatest strengths here are her world-building and linguistic creativity, although one has to wonder how much of a role translator Yuri Machkasov plays in casting that spell. Beginning with a straightforward, realistic style, Ms. Petrosyan slowly and carefully leads the reader step by step through suspension of belief to the House’s inner workings, which manifest in increasingly fluid sentences and offbeat vocabulary.
  “The Law” isn’t explained so much as it’s absorbed, as the reader is gradually initiated into its secrets. The glacial pace used to accomplish this might frustrate some people, but anyone who likes nonlinear narrative will be captivated as the story zig-zags through time.
  The plot isn’t exactly straightforward either, which is, perhaps, the point. The House’s residents have no reason — or desire — to return to a world that stigmatizes their wheelchairs, prosthetics and other physical and mental differences. It’s logical, then, that the House’s normal rituals and routines become anxious and frantic in the weeks leading up to graduation, occasionally leading to events Shirley Jackson would appreciate.
  When the adults finally catch on to the pattern and try to prevent it, the children--and the House--take matters into their own hands. This storyline, however, is just one of the House’s many rituals and shouldn’t be considered a traditional horror story.
  The boys themselves are a mixed bag of snarly and sensitive. Smoker, the most relatable of the bunch, is the reader’s ally in trying to navigate an environment that makes no sense to him. Sphinx and Black engage in the constant bickering anyone who’s ever been at the bottom of a social pecking order knows about all too well. Blind holds the key to many of the House’s mysteries, but he’s not telling.
  Even Ralph, the lone counselor who suspects there’s more to the boys than meets the eye, never fully understands what’s happening around him until it’s too late.
  This reviewer’s favorite, however, is the mischievous trickster Tabaqui, who frequently bursts into song, and whose inner monologues include poetic passages that could stand alone as good literature.
  Although they refer to themselves as dogs, rats and other animals, each boy is, for better and worse, all too human.
  “The Gray House” won’t please everybody, but its intended audience will savor each page and flip right back to the beginning after finishing. Hats off, then, to Mariam Petrosyan for a surreal ride through an unconventional universe.
  Leigh Anne Focareta is a freelance writer and friendly neighborhood librarian.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/13/the-gray-house-by-mariam-petrosyan-review
  Word count: 856

  The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan review – a cult magical realist saga
  A runaway success in Russia, translated into English at last, this epic set in a school for students with disabilities offers so much more than a Soviet Hogwarts

  Petrosyan’s house has hidden dimensions. Photograph: Alamy

  View more sharing options

  Shares
  270

  Comments
  2
  Phoebe Taplin
  Saturday 13 May 2017 07.30 BST
  Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 10.34 BST
  G
  angs of teenagers have strange adventures in a rambling boarding school on the edge of town: it sounds like a premise for a children’s book. But Mariam Petrosyan’s first novel, a 732-page magical realist saga two decades in the writing that has been a cult success in Russia, has unexpected depths as well as lashings of alcohol and violence. The Gray House is enigmatic and fantastical, comic and postmodern, flawed but brilliant, with elements of multiple genres – Rowling meets Rushdie via Tartt.
  It is the latest offering from AmazonCrossing, which now produces more books in translation than any other US publisher, focusing on popular and accessible fiction. Marian Schwartz, who translates for them, says: “Amazon may be bad for booksellers, but I don’t see AmazonCrossing being bad for literary translation.” The problem is sales: the books are not often available in shops and are rarely reviewed because “everyone hates Amazon”. So can The Gray House be successful in English?

  Sign up for the Bookmarks email
  Read more

  In the mid-1990s, Petrosyan, an Armenian graphic artist, showed friends in Moscow the manuscript of her then-unfinished novel. Passed from hand to hand, it found its way to a publisher in 2009. The following year, it was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and won several awards. It has since inspired postgraduate dissertations, Instagram pages of fan art and long signing queues. But Petrosyan has refused to write a sequel or sell the film rights to this complex and unusual epic. 
  The House is a school for students with disabilities; this literary ruse to isolate the protagonists is also an integral part of the novel’s exploration of identity. The teenagers use wheelchairs or prosthetics and the leader of the house is blind. Mundane details may not always ring true, but there is nothing sentimental or tokenistic about these wisecracking young adults, sporting dreadlocks, tattoos and a murderball-style physicality.
  Different characters narrate an overlapping series of events. Most of them are known only by a pseudonym or “nick”. We first experience the house through the eyes of Smoker; he is an outsider, who moves from the conformist “Pheasants” dormitory to the anarchic “Fourth”. Alternating with this are flashback chapters in which, confusingly, several people have different, earlier nicknames. Petrosyan excels at the fresh details that make up individual personalities. One inscrutable youngster likes “seltzer, stray dogs, striped awnings, round stones” and hates “white clothing, lemons … the scent of chamomile”.
  Individuality is a central theme, producing a symphony of narrative voices. “Everyone chooses his own House. It is we who make it interesting or dull,” explains a student called Sphinx. Later Sphinx tells his girlfriend, one of the novel’s relatively rare female characters: “Whoever’s telling the story creates the story. No single story can describe reality exactly the way it was.” 

  Songs and fairytales are part of the textual patchwork, along with allusions, from Hieronymus Bosch to the Kama Sutra

  The number of narrators proliferates, including the appealing figure of Tabaqui the Jackal, whose entries provide a kind of authorial manifesto: “I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than sometime-later.” Tabaqui embodies Petrosyan’s inventiveness, her resistance to chronology, her penchant for false trails and signs. 
  The house, it emerges, has hidden dimensions. Petrosyan plays with space and time, introducing parallel loops of narrative and a weird “Forest” with its own impenetrable laws. This boundless psychogeography distinguishes the school from a gritty Soviet version of Hogwarts, although there are superficial similarities – dorms that are sorted by personality types, mentions of dragons and basilisks.
  Advertisement

  At other times, there are echoes of Lord of the Flies: rival gangs of ungovernable boys, face painting, fires. Songs and fairytales are part of the textual patchwork, along with all kinds of allusions, from Hieronymus Bosch to the Kama Sutra. Petrosyan’s stylistic quirks match her flamboyant protagonists; one gothic-sounding sentence, rich in sub-clauses, lasts a page and a half. Yuri Machkasov’s translation is a Herculean feat. The intriguing original title, The House, In Which …, has gone, but Machkasov has captured the novel’s poetic richness.
  The Gray House is a Marmite book: worshipped by some, criticised by others as meandering nonsense, lacking either true magic or convincing realism. The plot can feel frustratingly serpentine, but, as Tabaqui explains: “Life does not go in a straight line.” To its most ardent fans, a spell in Petrosyan’s mysterious house is nothing short of life-changing.

Word Count