In 2012 Shrayer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research on Jewish poets and witnesses to the Shoah—a topic he investigated in his book "I SAW IT: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah" (2013) and in recent articles. His book "With or Without it: The Prospect for Russia's Jews," examines Russia's dwindling yet still vibrant Jewish community. In 2018 he published another anthology, "Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature," to feature over 80 authors. Unlike most representatives of the so-called "new wave" of Russian-American writing, Maxim D. Shrayer had written and published extensively in his native Russian prior to having made a transition to writing prose predominantly in English. He continues to write literary prose in both languages and to co-author translations of his English-language works into Russian. Shrayer began to write poetry and prose in his native Russian at the age of eighteen and subsequently contributed it to Russian-language magazine abroad and in the former USSR. His Russian-language poetry has been gathered in three collections. At Brown University Shrayer majored in comparative literature and literary translation and studied fiction writing with John Hawkes. Around 1995, the year when he received a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale University, Shrayer switched to creative prose mainly in English. His stories, essays and memoirs, have since appeared in American, Canadian, and British magazines, among them "Agni", "Kenyon Review", "Southwest Review," and "Tablet Magazine". Shrayer's works have been translated into Russian, Japanese, German, Croatian, Italian, Chinese, Slovak and other languages. Shrayer's literary memoir "Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration" appeared in 2007 as the first literary book in the English language to capture the experience of Soviet Jewish emigres and former refuseniks waiting in Italy en route to the New World. Of "Waiting for America" Sam Coale wrote in "The Providence Journal" that "[t]he glory of this book lies in Shrayer's sinuous, neo-Proustian prose, beautifully fluid and perceptive with its luminous shocks of recognition, landscapes, descriptions and asides…Tales and teller mesmerize and delight." Shrayer's "Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story", chronologically a prequel to "Waiting for America", came out in 2013 and was a finalist of the National Jewish Book Awards.