About the book: 2024 / "Christina's Red Notebooks" is a collection of short prose by Alexandra Shalashova, united by the theme of universal fragility and vulnerability. Here are stories bordering on auto-fiction, and snatched sketches from life, and mystical stories. It seemed today that the swallows had returned to us, that in the summer they screamed deafeningly, hatched their chicks, and then calmed down and flew away. And today they are again under the balcony in December - as if they knew that I had prepared a shelter for them long ago. By capturing the everyday life, focusing on seemingly insignificant details, the author surprisingly accurately manages to convey the feeling of the fragility of the world. This is piercing prose about love, loneliness, pain and healing, memory and oblivion. And when you want to remember a smell, it is somehow surprisingly not remembered, slips away, becomes fragmentary: you bring your hands to your face, checking what is left there, whether there is any something? Nothing, not even memory.