[5] Vapnyar has been consistently associated by critics with an emerging group of young, Russian-American authors who, in addition to writing exclusively in English, share a “preoccupation with questions of cultural identity, adaptation and assimilation, and nostalgia.

"[6] Along with Vapnyar, this group includes writers such as David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Olga Grushin, Irina Reyn, Maxim D. Shrayer, Anya Ulinich, Gary Shteyngart and others, all of whom immigrated to the United States and Canada from the former USSR as children or young people.

[7] Because of their shared interest in articulating the immigrant experience in a nonnative language, Vapnyar and her literary cohorts are frequently called “translingual,” and explore “what it means to be a Russian writer with a hyphen.

"[10] On the other hand, depicting “North American contexts from the perspective of a Russian newcomer” allows the authors to effectively communicate the alienating experience of immigration and to help them establish their own translingual, transcultural identities.

"[13] This trope is essentially an act of parody, where novels and short stories produced by the group present protagonists that are authors or storytellers themselves, spending the majority of the narratives explaining their Soviet lives to American characters.