Directory

Courses

English

Education

Ph.D.

Selected Publications, 2020-2025

BOOKS

Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature’s Most Enigmatic Heroine (Pegasus, 2020)
Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius, 1886-1887 (Pegasus, 2022) 
Well, Mr. Mudrick Said … A Memoir (Berkshire Publishing Group, 2021) [originally published in 2011]

EDITOR

Chekhov on Writing: The Mentor, The Self-Critic, Literary Questions and Fictional Writers (Dover Publications, 2025)
Ruskin on Art and Artists (Dover Publications, 2025)
“God Sees the Truth but Waits” and Other Moral Tales by Leo Tolstoy (Dover Publications, 2024)
Tolstoy in Search of Truth and Meaning: Wisdom from His Letters, Novels, Essays, and Conversations (Ixia Press, 2024)
Conversations with Karl Ove Knausgaard (University Press of Mississippi, 2023)
Dreams: A Literary Anthology (Dover Publications, 2023)
Female Abolitionists (Dover Publications 2021)
“The Lady with the Dog” and Other Love Stories by Anton Chekhov (Dover Publications 2021)

ESSAYS

“Papa Vronsky’s Big Serbian Adventure” (Tolstoy Studies Journal)
“Chekhov Goes Solar” (The Russia File, March 25, 2024, Russian Life)
“You’re Such a Character: The Knausgaard Behind Knausgaard” (Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 December 2023)
“Ode to Tom Clark,” Splice Today (16 May 2022)
“Marvin Mudrick Is 100” (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 17, 2021)

ARTICLES

Introduction to excerpts of Max Schott’s novel Ralph (Santa Barbara Independent, October 2, 2025)
Komar and Melamid: A Lesson in History, exhibit at Rutgers University (Russian Life, Spring 2023)
“‘Writing Isn’t a Sacred Activity, It Is an Ordinary Activity’: A Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard,” Los Angeles Review of Books (8 January 2021)

TRANSLATIONS

Chapbook, short story translation (Russian to English), Kashtanka: A Bilingual Reader by Anton Chekhov (Storyworkz, Inc., 2024)
And introduction to the short story “The Beauties” by Anton Chekhov (Russian Life, March-April 2020)
And introduction to the short story “Typhus” by Anton Chekhov (Russian Life blog, 23 April 2020)

LITERARY PODCAST GUEST

The History of Literature Podcast, #597, “Karl Ove Knausgaard (with Bob Blaisdell)” (March 25); reposted on Literary Hub (March 27, 2024)
Books of Some Substance, Nick Scandy, Episode 94, “Anton Chekhov’s ‘Difficult People’ with Bob Blaisdell” (2023)
The History of Literature, “My Last Book with Bob Blaisdell” (8 May 2023) 
“The History of Literature with Jacke Wilson” (Chekhov Becomes Chekhov) (15 December 2022)

REVIEWS

Muybridge by Guy Delisle (Christian Science Monitor Weekly, May 8, 2025)
100 Reasons Why Leo Tolstoy Cried by Katya Gushchina (Tolstoy Studies Journal)
Wagner and the Creation of the Ring by Michael Downes (Christian Science Monitor Weekly, September 1, 2025)
The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko (Russian Life, Summer 2025)
Chekhov in Context, edited by Yuri Corrigan (Russian Review, January 2024)
Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds by Tatyana Gershkovich (Tolstoy Studies Journal, 2023)
“When Tolstoy Met Trollope,” on Sophie Ratcliffe's Loss, A Love Story: Imagined Histories and Brief Encounters (Los Angeles Review of Books, April 17, 2024)
Conversations with Dostoevsky: On God, Russia, Literature, and Life by George Pattison (Russian Life, Summer 2024)
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans (Russian Life, Summer 2024)
Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King (The Christian Science Monitor Weekly, 23 December, 2024)
Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy: Mikhail Katkov and the Great Russian Novel by Susanne Fusso (Tolstoy Studies Journal, Vol. XXXIV)
Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter by Gary Saul Morson (Los Angeles Review of Books, 17 May 2023)
The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food by Darra Goldstein (Russian Life