A term of physiology and neurology, algometry is the science of measuring pain. However, it is not physical pain that Iryna Vikyrchak examines in Algometry, but her experiences growing up in Western Ukraine in the ’90s, emphasizing emotional sensitivity and inner strength, which give way to a philosophical and lyrical reflection on pain, suffering, and empathy as a measurement of our humanness....

A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of...

War and War, Laszla Krasznahorkai's second novel in English from New Directions, begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked by thuggish teenagers and robbed; and from here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's...

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives...

Our narrator is held in complete darkness and isolation. His endless thoughts are turned into the book we are reading-Schattenfroh-directed by none other than the narrator's mysterious jailer by the same name. Undulating through explorations of Renaissance art, the German reformation, time-defying esoterica, the printing process in the sixteenth century, Kabbalistic mysticism, and beyond,...

Mark Neider, a young Ukrainian-born American IT specialist, finds himself in crime-ridden Yeltsin’s Russia, hot on the trail of wheeler dealers who swindled him out of a small fortune back in New York. In Moscow, Mark survives an aborted coup in October 1993 and encounters a mysterious stranger who claims to have had a hand in the recent constitutional crisis. Tasha, Mark’s Moscow daredevil...

The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and...

This first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s...

A Ukrainian journalist ends each day “scorched by another person’s grief.” A schoolgirl in Croatia cherishes her Barbie and learns to dread air raid sirens more than her geometry homework. A poet imagines the spiritual life of a fish who escapes the hook. An exiled artist recreates her homeland in the shape of a bird. The writers assembled in this volume dream and document and remember, they...

The anthology presents translations of literary works by Series guests that imaginatively engage pivotal issues in today’s Ukraine and express its tribulations and jubilations. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays by fifteen Ukrainian writers, the anthology offers English-language readers a wide array of the most beguiling literature written in Ukraine in the past fifty years.

Before 1917, the Russian Tsar wielded absolute power over a vast empire, where more than 5 million Jews lived in isolation and segregation. Under the rule of Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), policies toward Jews became especially oppressive. Nicholas sought to erase Jewish identity by forcing their conversion to Christianity and promoting assimilation through mixed marriages. One of his most...

Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder...