Sentence: Stories - Mikhail Iossel - ★★

AUTHOR: Mikhail Iossel

GENRE: Short Story Collection

PUBLICATION DATE: August 1, 2025

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary collection of one-sentence stories. Not microfiction, unlike what I had assumed. Stretches the meaning of the word ‘sentence’. Hence this didn’t work that well for me, though I appreciate the creativity.

This book contains 38 entries, each written in a single sentence. In my ignorance, I thought these would be microfiction stories conveying everything in a sentence. This is right and wrong. Every entry has just one sentence, true. But the sentence spans many lines, and often, even many pages.

The collection doesn’t have a fictional feel to it as the entries are based on the authors’ musings and memories of his native Soviet Union and his observations on general human behaviour. The author had emigrated from Soviet Union to USA at the age of thirty, so his reminiscences of his earlier life are from an adult perspective and not necessarily full of nostalgic longing like some people’s fond memories of their home town would be.

A few of the “sentences” truly tested my patience and comprehension. The very first entry is 25 pages long. 25 pages of just one sentence! Creative but also taxing to focus on, all the more as you see just one endless chunky paragraph page after page. Just in case you are wondering how exactly one sentence can extend to 25 pages… there are loads of ellipses, comma splices, and parenthetical interjections in addition to the grammatically correct dependent clauses. These lengthier entries feel like you are listening to someone’s ramblings about something from their past: it might contain interesting moments but overall, it is one messy, unstructured narration.

Some entries are really deep and introspective, but some go too philosophical. Philosophy doesn’t ever work for me, so this further increased my disconnect from this collection.

I attempted to follow my usual method of rating the entries individually, but after just a few pages, I realised that I simply wasn’t able to concentrate on the longer “sentences”. I kept zoning out after every few lines. Only five stories made an impact on me: Road Long, Rain, Birds, Finishing Sentence, and Worded World. Not surprisingly, all of these were relatively minuscule.

Perhaps those who enjoyed Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand would love to give this a try. I still remember how lengthy her sentences were. In fact, one paragraph was nothing but an extended sentence of 1000+ words. (I stopped counting after 1000.) This book isn’t as poetically written as Tomb of Sand, but it is just as meandering.

Not my cup of tea. I appreciate the imaginativeness of this endeavour, but the execution would probably work better with those who enjoy stream-of-consciousness style writing.

My thanks to Literary Press Group of Canada and Linda Leith Publishing for providing the DRC of “Sentence” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book .Sorry this didn’t work out better.