Ukraine is a country caught in a political tug of war: looking East to Russia and West to the European Union, this pivotal nation has long been a pawn in a global ideological game. And since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 in response to the Ukrainian Euromaidan protests against oligarchical corruption, the game has become one of life and death.

Here the first three books of Paustovsky’s epic autobiography - long unavailable in English - appear in a splendid new translation by Douglas Smith. Taking the reader from Paustovsky’s Ukrainian youth, his family struggling on the verge of collapse, through the first stirrings of writerly ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on the front lines of World War I and then as a...

Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour: Memories of Soviet Russia traces Yelena Lembersky's childhood in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her life is upended when her family decides to emigrate to America, but instead her mother is charged with a crime and unjustly incarcerated. Told in the dual points of view, this memoir is a clear-eyed look at the reality of life in the...

Classic adventure of Sherlock Holmes as a parallel text in Russian and English!

Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M

Academic freedom—the institutional autonomy of scientific, research and teaching institutions, and the freedom of individual scholars and researchers to pursue controversial research and publish controversial opinions—is a cornerstone of any free society.  Today this freedom is under attack from the state in many countries—Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Hungary, China—but it is also under question...

'If political economy, i.e. the interdisciplinary study of interrelationships between political institutions and economic systems, has ever made sense, it is exactly now. Hardly any better example of mutual influence and co-determination between political action and economic behavior can be conceived than the historic transformation of a politically supercharged and embedded system into an...

An Orderly Mess is a timely diagnosis of the current dissolution of the modern order, while highlighting the opportunities of messiness. The essay focuses on the temporal and spatial dimensions in which messiness becomes apparent today: broken time lines and fragmented spaces. Messiness is framed by a blurring of the world orderings inherited from modernity. Against the backdrop of rapid...

Be Faithful unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments through which he goes ? and grows ? are superbly described. The novel is brimming with vivid detail from the...

Broken Masculinities portrays the post-dictatorial novel of the 1970s in all its complexity, and introduces the reader to a 1968-era Turkey, a period which challenges Turkey’s now reinforced Islamic image by portraying the quest for sexual liberation and critical student uprisings. Günay-Erkol argues that the literature written after the 1971 coup in Turkey constitutes a coherent sub-genre and...

'As simple as burek' is a popular phrase used by many young people in Slovenia. In this book Jernej Mlekuz maintains that the truth is just the opposite. The burek is a pie made of pastry dough filled with various fillings that is well-known in the Balkans, and also in Turkey and the Near East by other names. Whether on the plate or as a cultural artifact, it is in fact, not that simple. After...

After the entry of the Red Army into Czechoslovak territory in 1945, Red Army authorities began to arrest and deport Czechoslovak citizens to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The regions most affected were Eastern and South Slovakia and Prague. The Czechoslovak authorities repeatedly requested a halt to the deportations and that the deported Czechoslovaks be returned immediately. It took a long...