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.

Best known for the anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted writer of short fiction. The stories she wrote throughout her life reflect her political activism as well as her deep engagement with myth; they are also some of her most formally experimental work. This selection of Seghers’s best stories, written between 1925 and 1965,...

A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches...

The quest for self-discovery never ends, especially for Harry Haller-better known as the Steppenwolf. After a life spent in self-imposed isolation, Harry meets the mysterious Hermine and becomes captivated by her intoxicating power. Through their nighttime adventures, the Steppenwolf experiences the decadent underbelly of the bourgeois society he always despised. Harry becomes a man...

The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things that Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects...

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-'the starched collar,' as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of...

The events in the new novel by Andriy Kurkov and Yuriy Vynnychuk unfold in three plot sections: the Crusade of 1111, described in the Chronicle of the Knight Olgerd of Halych, the beginning of the Second World War in Lviv and Krakow, and the modern period. Who is the Virgin, and why has she been hunted for several centuries in a row, who is really the black archaeologist Oleg, and most...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells the story of washed-up actor Rick Dalton. Once Rick had his own television series, a famous western called Bounty Law. But 'it ain't been that time in a long time' and now Rick's only regular parts are as the heavy, ready to be bested by whichever young 'swingin' dick' the networks want to make a new star out of come pilot season. When a talent agent...

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

It tells the story of Michael Berg, a German lawyer who as a mid-teenager in 1958 had an affair with an older woman, Hanna Schmitz, who then disappeared only to resurface years later as one of the defendants in a war crimes trial stemming from her actions as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. Michael realizes that Hanna is keeping a personal secret she believes is worse than her Nazi past—a...

Three generations of the noble family of Mozhaisky serve the Motherland in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The novel consists of four interrelated parts: the production story 'Golden Beetle', designed as a memoir of the financial analyst Krimpay Mozhaisky, our contemporary; the space drama Mozhaisky's Plane, which describes battles on a universal scale unfolding in the basement of the estate...