Open Mic Night in Moscow: And Other Stories from My Search for Black Markets, Soviet Architecture, and Emotionally Unavailable Russian Men

Comedian Murray takes readers on an entertaining journey through destinations in the former U.S.S.R. that aren’t on a typical tourist’s must-see list, such as Tajikistan, Chernobyl, and Siberia. “By the time I turned twenty-eight, I’d become so obsessed with the countries that gave us beets, Dostoyevsky and websites for streaming pirated movies that it seemed perfectly logical to spend a year traveling through the former Soviet Union and trying to learn Russian,” she muses in her introduction. In witty stories, she chronicles her adventures negotiating stand-up comedy routines in front of Kazakhs (she has to perform in socks since no shoes are allowed inside), haggling taxi fares in Kyrgyzstan (she confused the exchange rate and was embarrassed when she realized they were charging her $3 rather than $70 ), and sleeping in a yurt with dive-bombing moths. The author’s travels take her on rickety prop planes in Tajikistan, on the Trans-Siberian Highway, and in one particularly horrifying scene, a near-kidnapping in Turkmenistan by a human trafficker posing as a taxi driver. She visits her ex-boyfriend Anton’s homeland of Belarus, which purportedly has the world’s highest number of police officers per capita, and moves on to couch-surfing in Lithuania. Murray turns what for many women would be a scary solo journey into an exhilarating experience. (July)