Alex Sheremet

As a child, Artem escaped the Chernobyl disaster in the hope of finding solid ground. As an adult, he must now unearth it, and learn to disentangle his past from the trick of memory we must all succumb to. In this remembrance—real or imagined?—he will befriend hoodlums, indulge the sage advice of a local pimp, and betray and face betrayals before settling on his true goal: to become an artist in order to recreate a world that's disappearing with his childhood.

Set against turn-of-the-millennium New York, A Few Streets More to Kensington deals with classic tropes of boyhood-nostalgia, curiosity, and the wars of self—now transposed to the streets of Brooklyn, and examined through an artist's reluctant gaze. Rich, melancholy, and contemplative, the tale subsists on the magic of the 1990s—even as it aims to transcend it, too.