An emigration story, Waiting for America explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting for America is also a vibrant love story in which the romantic main character is torn between Russian and Western women.

Maxim D. Shrayer was born in 1967 in Moscow and immigrated to the United States in 1987. Among his books are The World of Nabokov's Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew. A bilingual author and translator, Shrayer recently edited An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Shrayer is professor of Russian and English and chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages at Boston College. He is the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Shrayer lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, with his wife and two daughters.