Maxim Osipov reading excerpts in Russian of his new book, "Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories," published by New York Review Books in translation. The new edition from NYRB was translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson; edited by Boris Dralyuk. Joining Maxim to read passages from the book in English is Sabrina Jaszi.

Maxim Osipov (b. 1963) is a Russian writer and cardiologist. In the early 1990s he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, before returning to Moscow, where he continued to practice medicine and also founded a publishing house that specialized in medical, musical, and theological texts. In 2005, while working at a local hospital in Tarusa, a small town ninety miles from Moscow, Osipov established a charitable foundation to ensure the hospital’s survival. Since 2007, he has published short stories, novellas, essays, and plays, and has won a number of literary prizes for his fiction. He has published five collections of prose, and his plays have been staged all across Russia. Osipov’s writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Tarusa.