Aaron Hamburger

Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana Is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Hamburger's reply:

Currently I’m reading Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin. I was teaching a course on Tom Stoppard’s plays, including The Coast of Utopia, which is about the revolutionary writers and philosophers in the mid-1800s who laid the groundwork for the Russian Revolution years later. Stoppard leaned heavily on Berlin’s book to write his play. Russian Thinkers is not exactly a beach read, but it’s a fascinating portrait of time and place that helped me understand better the conditions that allowed the Russian Revolution to happen years later. One of my favorite parts is the portrait of Vissarion Belinsky, a sickly, socially awkward literary critic who in his short life profoundly influenced the writers and thinkers of his time. Belinsky argues that great art is not propaganda, and should not be engineered to convey some kind of message. “Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge—they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.” I want to tape this to the forehead of every budding young novelist! Russian Thinkers took on added interest for me because my grandparents (whose story I fictionalized in Hotel Cuba) lived through the Russian Revolution. It’s startling for me to think about how their lives were shaped by the intellectual musings of the Russian intelligentsia a half-century before they were born.

Visit Aaron Hamburger's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hotel Cuba.

My Book, The Movie: Hotel Cuba.

--Marshal Zeringue