The scholarly journey through storylines explores the ways in which younger writers in Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), a diverse, dynamic, but under-studied border city in east Ukraine today, come to grips with a traumatized post-Soviet cultural landscape.

In the memoir The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner for nearly three years at a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk.

Peter Wilson looks to 500 years of history to contest rigid assumptions about German militarism. Historically German-speaking states have had complex--that is, typical--politics surrounding militarization, strategy, and civilian control. The belief in German military genius arose only in 1871 and was soon dashed by the two world wars.

In post-1917 Russian and Yiddish literature, films, and reportage, Sasha Senderovich finds a new cultural figure: the Soviet Jew. Suddenly mobile after more than a century of restrictions under the tsars, Jewish authors created characters who traversed space and history, carrying with them the dislodged practices and archetypes of a lost world.

Americans call the Second World War 'the Good War.' But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens-and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass...

Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war-and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.

A charming rhyming story about a little girl named Annie who has curly hair and wants nothing more than for it to be straight. One morning, Annie refuses to go to school because her classmates have been teasing her for not having hair like theirs. After sending her mother on quite the wild goose chase, we follow Annie on an adventure to a hair salon, where she quickly learns just how lucky...

This book compiles stories and novellas, written in America (with the exception of one) in the last decade. It's symbolic title That Strange Feeling of Freedom is not incidental.

Zuleikha is the model of a dutiful wife. Biddible and meek, she has resigned herself to brutal treatment at the hands of her cruel husband and the carping of her despotic mother-in-law. While Russia reels in the aftermath of its recent revolution, life in her small Tatar village is relatively untouched. Or so it seems to Zuleikha, until the day her husband is executed by communist soldiers.

In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following.

Baguette, a seemingly ordinary house cat, is a descendant of the magic Catlanteans who lived long ago in peace and happiness on the island of Catlantis. When he falls in love with the seductive alley cat Purriana, she insists Baguette accomplish a heroic feat before she’ll agree to marriage.

This astonishing, autobiographical tour de force was written by Hans Fallada in an encrypted notebook while he was incarcerated in a Nazi insane asylum. Discovered after his death, it tells the tale—often fierce, often poignant, often extremely funny—of a small businessman losing control as he fights valiantly to blot out an increasingly oppressive society.