Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker appear in a Literary Arts Live event on Feb. 11.

Authors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker, co-editors of the anthology Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, come to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College to present a reading and conversation at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, in the Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Open to the public at no cost, Iossel and Parker’s visit is sponsored by the Literary Arts Live series, presented by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ English department. For more information, please contact 207-753-6963.

Rasskazy, released in 2009 by Tin House Books, features some of Russia’s most prominent young writers — part of a generation that never knew communism — in a collection of works that gives insight into today’s Russia. Many of the stories appear in English for the first time in this anthology.

Iossel and Parker previously co-edited the 2004 anthology Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive Press). Amerika is a collection of literary essays by diverse Russian writers focusing on the contrasts between global perceptions of the United States and reality.

The author of the autobiographical short-story collection Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991) Iossel is a contributor to The New Yorker and has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a Guggenheim fellowship.

He came to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1986. He is an associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal and the founder and executive director of the Summer Literary Seminars International Programs.

Parker is the author of the nonfiction book Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal (HarperCollins, 2014), the novel Ovenman (Tin House, 2007) and the short story collection The Taste of Penny (Dzanc Books, 2010).

Parker teaches in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the cofounder and director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Professor Jane Costlow, a specialist in Russian literature and culture who travels frequently to Russia, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15, at 161 Wood St., as part of Spiritual Sojourners, a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

Costlow was born and grew up on the coast of North Carolina, she says, “which means my first landscape was the ocean, that wonderful full emptiness of sounds and smells and endless horizon.”

The daughter of biologists, Costlow became an Episcopalian and grew interested in Russia. These experiences, she says, “contributed in some complicated way to where I am now.”

“My first ‘memory’ of Russia is of lying in bed at night imagining the plane in the distance was the Russians coming to get us. Must have been 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Costlow recalls. “Years later I spent an academic year in what was still Leningrad. I learned Russian. Demonstrated against nuclear weapons. Worked in a soup kitchen. Wondered if I really wanted to be an academic.”

After coming to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, marrying and having children, Costlow and her family settled in Auburn. “From where I live,” she says, “you can see out over the Androscoggin towards Lewiston and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. The steeple of Trinity Episcopal Church is just visible, and the amazing skies roll in from Canada. I’m ‘living in the question’ — with deep gratitude for languages and landscapes.”

Each speaker in this series has a story to tell, says its organizer ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace. The speaker’s personal sojourns serve as “starter dough” for conversation, Blaine-Wallace says.

Costlow’s talk, the fifth in the series, will be followed by three additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.

According to Costlow, the book, just republished in Russia, is one of the great forgotten works of pre-revolutionary Russia, the story of a young girl between the ages of eight and 14 as she “comes to an awareness of herself and the world around her,” Costlow said.

Costlow also has translated the novel into English, to be published in 1998 by Northwestern University Press. She decided to translate the work after using a few chapters in a Russian literature class at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, where themes of girlhood and environmental issues resonated with students. A member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty since 1986, Costlow graduated from Duke University and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University. She lives with her family in Auburn.