iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews From the Woodshed: Pilot crashes in desert, hallucinates love and tenderness. Surreal word salad, with pictures - never liked deserts at night, myself. Elephant inside python illustration a triumph of something, the rest revoltingly sentimental. Two out of four cows. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I've had it with cafe culture: ilonayazhbinchavasse.substack.com/p/the-art-of...

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Oh, no. The man who made Transsexual Transylvania a viable tourist destination, and could deflower fantasy virgins with just the power of his voice as Darkness. Rest in quiverings, fabulous Tim Curry. #timcurry #rockyhorror

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Miss Ada Doom's Reviews From the Woodshed: Eye-wateringly thorough meander across the OS map of Oxfordshire, with Tom Bombadil for your reward. Keep the ring, the cows need milking. Deus ex machina wizard, eagles. Three out of four cows, half a cow docked for Bombadil. #booksky #tolkien #lotr

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Miss Ada Doom's Reviews from the Woodshed: three goes of a mind unravelling, like a hotel whose top floors are made of bats. Labyrinthine, mesmerising, tastily sharp - until you realise the author has left the building and it’s all bats. Volume one, three out of four bats. #booksky #gormenghast

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Miss Ada Doom's Reviews from the Woodshed: we're all wandering in a mind-swamp of our own making and @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social doesn't owe you an explanation. Dunno what it is but we sure know how it feels, like the wrong-way-up tower haunting my dreams. Three and a hoof out of four cows. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

The sixteen and the thirteen-year-old are watching Twelve Angry Men. Earlier they were cackling over a moronic TikTok. Every time I worry, I’m raising rot-brained social media addicts, they remind me I’ve already raised them as scatter-gun-cultured weirdos.

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

My local cafe is using these exquisitely bound Reader’s Digest hardbacks as set dressing, and the owner is amused to find out I can read a digested novel in the time it takes me to have 2 slow cups of coffee. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

a perfect visual representation of what drain-the-swamp was always aiming for

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Joy is weird snacks snd a friend who know you you well enough to supply them.

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Miss Ada Doom Reviews From the Woodshed: James Clavell's Shogun - stranger in a strange and highly-civilised land where part of the civilising influence is the foundational proximity of cavalierly dispensed death. Pilot means navigator, Jesuits tricksy. Three and a half out of four cows. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Miss Ada Doom Reviews From the Woodshed: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy - a million pages about India's Partition smuggled into a short story about an indecisive girl and her interfering mother. Authorial brio noted. Three and a half holy cows out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview #fiction #review

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I went to a book event yesterday in a Bloomsbury square in the pouring rain - and they had this bed for a Jilly Cooper photo-op. Someone said, I don’t know why more people aren’t taking their picture on it. And I was like, because you forgot to put Aidan Turner in it. #rivals #womensprize

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Ian McEwan's Atonement: Oscar Wilde had it right — the good end happily, but only in fiction. Three out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: Come back, Godot, all is forgiven. And take these wastrels with you when you go. Three out of four cows. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

ET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code: Jesus — excuse me, let's just call him "of Galilee" — wept. I never wanted to go to the Louvre, and my feeling has been correct, entirely. #booksky #bookreview

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

my friend's email cut off at Hi Ilona - - I've just learned that I'll be a f And for a moment I died, thinking it was going to say "going to be a father." problems of the middle-aged

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

Mr C is on a field trip: “My B&B is opposite the Emily Dickinson house, now museum, in Amherst. I expect you know her work?” Closed today, but I can still wander around town listening to her (somewhat gloomy) poetry on Spotify”

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

80% of your proposed line edits are an instant yes, 20% are no one knows this text like me and I will die on this hill

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth - decades of building a medieval cathedral, and with the assorted goings-on, a miracle it didn’t take centuries. Gripping melodrama, lots of buttresses. Three out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview #follett

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Mario Puzo's The Godfather: Who doesn't love a family business. Even when tempers flare. Even when it's not a farm. Badly written and entirely page-turning. Two and a half out of four cows. #booksky #bookreview

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle - you’ll never again eat a sausage you haven’t made yourself. And something about unions. Two out of four sows, not cows, just this once. #booksky #bookreview

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx - Victorian novel pastiche with added structural labyrinth and a tangled bloodlines plot to make Jarndyce and Jarndyce bleed from the ears. Enjoyed until exhaustion. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): Louche, bored aristocrats plot and confess sexual escapades in that most secret medium, letters. Fun, until everyone punished or dead or married off or exiled. France, meanwhile, runs out of paper. #booksky #book

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

AI translation can compress meaning and port it across like a translator: it can’t transport the experience because it experiences nothing. It can’t re-engineer the body’s somatic response to the text because it feels nothing. It can’t communicate the knowing of a text, because it knows fuck all.

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF: Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): E Taylor’s Angel: unlikeable girl grows up into unlikely novelist, marries unpleasant man, reaps all unattractive seeds sowed. Lesson in there somewhere, whether for novelists or for lady novelists, I couldn’t say. #booksky

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

LET ME BE BRIEF Miss Ada Doom’s Reviews from the Woodshed (a series): E.M. Forster’s Howards End - an umbrella as deus ex machina, how terribly, suitably English. But what a lot of sturm and drang for a house that isn’t even a farm. #booksky #books

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

My Chernobyl anniversary isn’t April 26. Is the 28th - the day I got locked outside, seventy miles away, and watched the biggest raindrops I’ve ever seen fall from a violet-silver-green cloud that was gone in five minutes. #chernobyl open.substack.com/pub/ilonayaz...

open.substack.com

A Sky So Blue It Hurt Your Eyes

Forty years after Chernobyl, my private anniversary

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Big thanks to Jacqueline Nyathi @hararereview.com for the fab review. I really love it when people enjoy reading the book almost as much as I enjoy translating it.

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Dostoyevsky didn’t have to, ffs. (why it’s taken me 25 years to finish a work of fiction - my own, for a change - actually two in three months - ruthless avoidance of my family) #writing #novel

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

To Pushkin House this week for a two-hander talk about translating indigenous literature from the far north. Still very charmed and not a little weirded out by the idea that kind, interested people would pay to hear me talk about anything. #translation #translator #russian #rustrans

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Delirious is exactly how it often felt to be translating it - in the best possible way.

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Huge thanks to @locusmag.bsky.social and Paul Di Filippo for the thoughtful review - and yes, “Courtyard…” really ought to make it over to English readers! Paging @angryrobotbooks.bsky.social

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

I was moved and disturbed by Egana Djabbarova’s writing - can’t wait to see the book again in @lizoksbooks.bsky.social translation

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Christmas day with my dear, now elderly in-laws. This probably isn’t the saddest cup of coffee in England - dregs of the Nescafe jar, semi-skimmed milk - but pity me all the same. There is a metric ton of cheese in the fridge. I shall be drinking all the port in the house, by and by.

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Translating genre is creative: funny things have to be funny, scary things scary. Genre can be ambitious and talk about what people are really preoccupied with - what they desire and dread - doesn’t have to be “austere and unflinching,” etc. @crimereads.bsky.social lithub.com/chilling-lit...

lithub.com

Chilling Lit: Six Novels in Translation That Blend Folktales and Horror

Togetherness that’s on the side of suffocating, history that won’t stay put or past, and nature that doesn’t just exist, benignly, but watches and waits….Folk horror deals in dissonance, drea…

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Including her own, natch. You’ll love it, I promise! 😂

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

I do! I do recommend them, and I recommend my translation of The Village at the Edge of Noon, too. Go buy a book or two! And #dontgointhewoods

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Reposted by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

Angry Robot Books @angryrobotbooks.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

"Valerych roared, and he struck out for the other riverbank - away from the incinerating flame and the village and his dead goddamned wife - toward the other world, the other shore." Published today! Is it terror in the woods? Or the truth? Translated by @missadadoom.bsky.social.

A promotional panel. It shows the cover of the 2025 Angry Robot edition of The Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva, translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. The next reads: Everything you were afraid to find out about the heat of noon and grandma's old tales comes together... Out now!

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Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse @missadadoom.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Buyer’s premorse- I haven’t bought it yet, but I fully intend to regret this purchase

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