This book of short stories and miniatures by Vladimir Stepan strengthens his reputation as one of the best domestic masters of short prose. Laconic, transparent texts, in which there is not a single superfluous word, are made between artistic documentary and autofiction. At first glance, they belong to the tradition of pure realism, but upon careful reading it is easy to see that the author...

Experiencing unrequited love, the heroine of Daria Traiden's novel buys a village house in Belarus and begins renovating it. Transforming and inhabiting her own space on her native land is her strategy for preserving meaning. Reflecting on body, identity, poverty, violence, and family, the author searches for and reinvents her roots. Equally about love and home, the book explores the...

‘Diary’ is a chronicle of the psychological breakdown of the country. The time of overturned destinies and burned-out feelings gives birth to a special literature, uncomfortable and disturbing. Here the author becomes general. Therefore, without a name, about everyone in the first person. ‘It's very difficult to write - everything is a stupor. Our current context adds to the senselessness -...

Andrey Dudko's novel is a psychedelic parody of autofiction. The protagonist, a fake alter ego of the writer, abandons his family and job and retreats to the provincial town of Slonim to create a literary masterpiece in the solitude of his empty family home. However, alcohol, casual sex, and the phantoms of his childhood haunting the city hinder his creativity. Instead of writing, the...

‘The Biggest Ferris Wheel’ is a novel-autofiction in which real life, resembling fiction, blends with fantasy, resembling life. Simple and bright stories from life, brief love affairs that never developed into anything more, the painful experience of war, encounters with people identified by initials of varying degrees of obviousness—this motley narrative is brought together in touching...

‘Nine-Shoes’ is a collection of texts by Viktor Shenderovich, written in various (very different) years and serving as an artistic reflection on several eras in Russian life. For forty years—from the early Andropov era to the late Putin era—Shenderovich has been trying to answer the question of why the country never emerged from slavery and at what point we stopped hearing the warning signs....

A collection of stories that stand out for their special feminine irony, psychologism, and lack of taboos. This is prose about finding oneself, about the life of a ‘little person’ in the big world, written in incredibly lively and sharp language.

This is a true Euro-novel from a first-wave Belarusian emigrant who, in pursuit of abstraction, embarks on an odyssey from Prague to Amsterdam, along the way dismantling modern Europe, Belarus of that time, and, of course, himself. Along the way, he will encounter museums, ghosts of the past, spontaneous lovers, and communists, whom the author will fend off with a sharp pen and a well-aimed...

The book ‘A soda machine with syrup and without’ by Uladzimir Nyaklyaev is a social novel that, through microstories of Minsk bohemia, tells us about History with a capital letter. In this History, there are many faces standing together in line for soda: Lee Harvey Oswald and Kim Khadeyev, dissidents and G.E.B.s, survivors of World War II and cold front fighters, the one who reported and who...