Richard at Caravana de recuerdos has recently covered Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a novel I give my highest recommendation to without any hesitation (see here for the summary of my posts on the novel). Both of us read the NYRB edition, translation by Robert Chandler.

While poking around recently some of Chandler’s other translations (tied to my reading Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur), I ran across the following series of videos with Robert Chandler about Grossman. Life and Fate dominates the early part of these videos but he touches on other stories and books by Grossman, his style, and his appeal. I enjoyed his talk so much that I’m embedding all five videos in this post. If you think you might be interested in reading anything by Grossman you will benefit by watching these videos. Warning: you may want to read more by Grossman after watching these videos. Many thanks to MacLehose Press for uploading these videos.
MacLehose Press’ description of the videos:

Robert Chandler is perhaps best known as the translator of Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate. He has also translated a second Grossman novel, Everything Flows, and a volume of short stories, The Road, as well as works by Platonov, Pushkin and the Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov and the poetry of Sappho and Guillaume . He has also edited or is in the process of editing anthologies of Russian short stories and poetry.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Update: an earlier interview with Chandler by Sarah J. Young, conducted about the time of the release of the collection of Grossman stories The Road.