Ukrainian novelist and publicist Yan Valetov's novel 'The Best Age to Die' conceals, beneath the guise of a tense action film, a conversation about what awaits humanity if it doesn't come to its senses. The dynamic post-apocalyptic plot is truly intriguing, and you won't want to take a break from the characters, as something new is constantly happening to them. A terrifying virus has engulfed...

One February day, an elephant appears in every home. Enormous. Silent. Uninvited. No one knows where it came from or why it's there. Some pretend nothing is happening, others try to figure it out, and still others write about it in the comments. Sasha Filipenko's new novel is about fear and courage, about love and detachment, about people who have faced something greater than themselves and...

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,...

On his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic amusement park ride accident in an attempt to save a little girl’s life. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by both loved ones and distant strangers.

She is a winner of the NOS and Debut awards, as well as the Andrei Bely Prize. Alla Gorbunova's prose is utterly authentic and attracts a wide range of readers, from renowned literary critics, artists, and philosophers to college and high school students. This book is no exception. Funny, sad, touching, and sometimes terrifying, yet surprisingly vivid, these stories are imbued with the light of...

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...

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.

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...