Welcome to Literary Friction. I'm Carrie Plitt here with my co-host Octavia Bright,

and we're so excited to be here for a live recording of literary friction at

Jewish Book Week. Wow, listen to that live crowd. What energy, what excitement. Hi, Octavia.

Hi, Carrie. Good. I'm very excited to be here in front of such a massive live crowd.

Yeah, giant. So we have a really fabulous author here with us as well.

And I was wondering if you wouldn't mind introducing her.

Of course, with pleasure. So we've been joined by Yelena Moscovich,

who is a Ukrainian-born, American, French artist and writer. And Virtuoso, which is the book we're going to be talking about, is her second novel.

Yelena was born in the former USSR and emigrated to Wisconsin with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991.

After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College in Boston,

she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre

and later gained a master's in art, philosophy and aesthetics from Universite Paris.

Her plays and performances have been produced around the world,

and her work as a visual artist has been exhibited at Queer Biennale Los Angeles,

where she has also served as a curator, but she's hearing very firmly authorial

voice today to talk to us.

A multi-talented woman.

Thank you guys so much for having me.

Yes, so for the next hour, and we literally have a clock counting us down here, and we cannot

go beyond our hour.

We will be interviewing Yelena, giving some book recommendations, as we usually

do on the podcast. And then we will open it up for the last 15 minutes for questions from the audience.

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