American singer, music producer, public figure, and fateful lady Joanna Stingray arrived in Leningrad in the early 1980s. For more than ten years, her life was inseparably tied to the USSR and to the world of Soviet underground culture. That amazing world struck Joanna so powerfully and inspired her so much that she became one of the best-known popularizers of Soviet and post-Soviet rock culture in the West.
Two Joanna Stingray memoir books—“Stingray in the Country of Miracles” and “Stingray Through the Looking-Glass”—are now released in a single volume in a new design with a new foreword by the author. In it, Joanna tells about her visits to Russia in 2004 and 2018, her daughter Madison, the process of writing her memoirs, and much else that occupied her after returning to America. Once you read them, you’ll learn how it really was.
This book is an invaluable testimony to the process of how Russian rock and art-underground emerged and developed during its most fruitful “golden” period. Boris Grebenshchikov and Viktor Tsoi, Yuri Kasparyan and Sergei Kuryokhin, Kostya Kinchev and Timur Novikov, Afrika and Kolya Vasin, David Bowie and Andy Warhol, and many, many others—heroes of the fairy-tale Land of Miracles.
Thirty years later, Joanna decided to return to this bright period of her biography and tell about all the twists and turns in her book. It’s a look from the inside—not only of a witness, but also of a direct participant in many events that were destined to become history. Her memoirs are open and remarkably honest; they are memories of people she loved and continues to love.