Splices of Life

Mikhail Iossel’s Sentence is the perfect book to read on public transit. These stories both capture and reinforce the way thoughts drift and memories flood in as you watch the world go by.

Each of the collection’s thirty-eight pieces is a single sentence, ranging from twenty words to twenty-five pages. The first and longest story, “DMD,” set during the dying days of the Soviet Union, recounts a cognac-soaked ride with a stranger in the forced intimacy of a train compartment. As in the other longer entries, a plot emerges and a backstory of people and nations bleeds through in the details. But Iossel is equally, maybe even primarily interested in the traps and springs that give rise to thoughts and insights. We have the “dusky placid light of the Bologoye train station,” which brings about “the memories of our own lives.” In “Waltz No. 2,” the sound of Shostakovich played by a subway musician leads the narrator to be “suddenly overtaken . . . by one very...