So can you tell us which book you selected?

Um, so I have chosen Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Viktor Shklovsky.

Uh, most people are familiar with him as a kind of for- um, formalist critic, um, who came up with the term defamiliarization, um, to kind of refer to how literature should kind of make us see the world in a new way and kind of make it strange for us again.

Um, this novel was written in 1922 when he was in exile in Berlin.

Um, he was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, um, who tried to do, um, attempt a coup against the Bolsheviks because the Bolsheviks were, you know, too extreme.

Um, and then he moved back to Russia in 1923.

So he's just in Berlin, um, quite briefly.

[laughs]