Greg Blake Miller discusses “The Kuleshov Effect” and more on the Ocean Bridge podcast

Last month, Ocean Bridge—a remarkable group of novelists, poets, journalists, publishers, editors and other creatives from Ukraine and the Russian and Ukrainian diaspora—invited Svetlana and me for an online “author’s evening” focused on my novel The Kuleshov Effect (Эффект Кулешова) and other projects I’ve got in the works. What a privilege and pleasure it was to spend a couple of hours on the “Bridge” speaking with and reading for these extraordinary people!

The recording of the session is now up on YouTube, complete with some old photos and even a song… The caveat is that most of it is in Russian, but I read in English at these spots: 18:24 (The first scene in “Kuleshov”), 43:23 (how the American student Tom Benjamin winds up with a litter of kittens in Saint Petersburg), 1:34:17 (where I actually sing Tom’s song for Kira), 1:39:30 (about Tom’s mind-bending journey to the symphony to listen to Shostakovich), and 2:19:56 (my recent poem, “Phantom”). For the Russian speakers out there, there’s lots of fun conversation and intel on how the book came to be, and Svetlana Miller reads several of the chapters in Russian, from Kira’s point of view.

Many thanks to everyone who attended, with a special hat tip to the poet and peerless captain of Ocean Bridge, Gari Lait (author of Confluences); editor extraordinaire Oleksiy Kretovich; the wonderful writers Marina Dyachenko (co-author, with Sergei Dyachenko, of the Vita Nostra series), Dmitry Bykov (Дмитрий Львович Быков, VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation), and Alexei Nikitin (Victory Park); the scholar Victor Shtern; and the founder of Freedom Letters publishing, Georgy Urushadze (winner of the American Association of Publishers’ 2025 International Freedom to Publish Award)! #FreedomLetters #globusbooks

To watch this episode of “The Ocean Bridge,” please click the image above.

I hope to bring this book to an English-language readership soon!