The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis take place over decades of transition in a country that rather resembles modern-day Azerbaijan.

Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.

e author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet...

As the author states that her book ‘...is about courage, too, about the out-and-out courage to claim what is rightfully yours, to recognize it, to dig in your heels, and never give away to anyone what is yours, your home, your motherland, your heart, your right to walk with your head held high.... The author calls her novel Daughter part of the war effort. The heroine absorbs both what I (the...

Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against East Germany’s communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain—and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany’s brutal state security force. In thetradition of Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to...

Schlump, written by Hans Herbert Grimm, was published anonymously in 1928 and was one of the first German novels to describe World War I in all its horror and absurdity, and it remains one of the best. What really sets it apart is its remarkable central character. Who is Schlump? A bit of a rascal and a bit of a sweetheart, a victim of his times, an inveterate survivor, maybe even a new type of...

From one of Russia’s most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother’s ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her...

Between Anti-Fascist Society, Socialist Utopia and Lived Jewishness: What did it mean to be Jewish in the GDR? After the Shoah, many Jews made the conscious choice to live in East Germany, to be part of building a new, more equitable socialist society, hoping for greater justice and to overcome antisemitic structures. This volume looks at what became of their ideals, how Jewish life was newly...

Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town ninety miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia's best-regarded writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to craft stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Rich in comparison but devoid of cheap sentiment, Osipov's fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait...

In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, historian Timothy Snyder carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With On Tyranny, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, ‘Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy...

Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukranian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of...

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