Photo by Billy Tompkins

Emily Rubin's debut novel 'Stalina' was published in January 2011.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Stalina Folskaya’s homeland is little more than a bankrupt country of broken dreams. She flees St. Petersburg in search of a better life in America, leaving behind her elderly mother and the grief of the past. A trained chemist in Russia, but disillusioned by her prospects in the US, she becomes a maid at The Liberty, a “short-stay” motel on the outskirts of Hartford. Able to envision beauty and profit even here, Stalina convinces her boss to let her transform the motel into a fantasy destination. Business skyrockets and puts the American dream within her sights. Obsessed with avenging her family while also longing for a new life, Stalina is about a woman whose imagination—and force of personality—will let her stop at nothing.

Rubin’s fiction has been published in the Red Rock Review, Confrontations, and HAPPY. She is a past nominee for the Pushcart Prize. In 2005, she began producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading series that takes place in Laundromats around the United States. She divides her time between New York City and Columbia County, New York with her husband, Leslie, and their dog, Sebastian.