03/22/2026
Join Dr. Angie McCartney (aka The World's Oldest Podcaster®) and daughter Ruth for Tuesday at 11:30am Pacific time on https://fb.com/drangiemccartney on 3/24/26
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988 at nine. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes, all from HarperCollins. HarperCollins will publish his new novel, The Unwanted, about a family in flight from civil war in an unnamed country, on March 25, 2025.
His reporting, essays, travelogues, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times (Magazine, Book Review, Op-Ed, Sunday Review, etc.), The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Travel + Leisure (where he is Contributing Writer), Saveur, New York Magazine, Food & Wine, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The New Republic, and other publications. (See Journalism.)
His first novel, A Replacement Life, received a front-cover rave in The New York Times Book Review: “Is there room in American fiction for another brilliant young émigré writer? There had better be, because here he is. Boris Fishman’s first novel, “A Replacement Life,” is bold, ambitious and wickedly smart… The only problem with this novel is that its covers are too close together… Undoubtedly, comparisons will be made — to Bellow and the Roths (Henry and Philip)… [and] Bernard Malamud.”
It was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick; a best-of-year selection by The San Francisco Chronicle, Shakespeare & Co., and others; a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and received praise from The New Yorker, NPR, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Publishers Weekly (starred review), MSN, Vogue, and others.
His second novel, Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, received many enthusiastic notices from NPR, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and others, including these words from The New York Times Book Review: “‘Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo’, the second novel by the tender, dolorous, sharp and funny writer Boris Fishman… is peopled by characters so eccentric they feel like family. He has the rare gift of startling us with a foreign culture and simultaneously making it feel like home… Fishman’s appreciation of superstition, New and Old World, is subtle, comic and irresistible… Fishman describes the turmoil of family, parenthood and cultural emotion with urgent, sly detachment. His language has the originality and imagination of someone who comes to English with unexpected thoughts and rhythms in his head, and he is, simply, a joy to read.”
His third book, Savage Feast, received endorsements from Kirkus (starred review), The New York Times (“a tightly-written page-turner”), Amazon (Best Book of the Month + #1 Best Seller in Culinary Biographies and Memoirs), NPR, The Wall Street Journal (“Mr. Fishman’s story — as a refugee, a seeker and an insatiable eater — is inherently compelling. But the book’s brilliance lies in the author’s self-awareness and honest appraisal of his, and his family’s shortcomings”), Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post (“extraordinary”), and Paste, among others, and this great compliment from The Philadelphia Inquirer: “I’ve been reading every food memoir available, including those by Anthony Bourdain, Gabrielle Hamilton, Ruth Reichl, Michael Pollan, Samin Nosrat, Michael Twitty, and now Boris Fishman. His is the most focused and most multilayered of these wonderful books.”
Boris taught in Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program from 2015-2020 and in the MFA program at The University of Montana from 2020-22. He is now a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Austin, and an occasional wine writer for Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine and The New York Times.
Learn more at BorisFishman.com
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