Trespassers Welcome Here Author:Karen Karbo In this wryly amusing collection of interrelated first-person vignettes, the disarming self-revelations of a group of Russian emigres newly transplanted to Southern California are both witty and poignant. — Karbo's cast of alternating narrators, all associated with the Slavic Studies department of a university, include a writer-in-exile still... more » nursing old literary rivalries; a middle-aged teaching assistant desperately trying to turn herself into the all-American girl (and shed her lumpish husband); a Soviet actress attempting to navigate the uncertain waters of Hollywood auditions, callbacks and false promises; and a hapless KGB agent who wonders why her co-workers treat her with such suspicion and hostility (after all, as she points out, she works for those who send people to gulags, but doesn't do it herself).« less