Here cattlemen steal geese, drink port on the roof of the Kazan Cathedral, Soviet citizens hunt for shortages and mock the leaders; here the romantic builders of the Great Empire love, believe and cheat, and the golden Brezhnev era becomes clearer in the haze like a beautiful and nostalgic picaresque novel.

'Legends of Arbat' is a collection of incredibly funny and dizzying stories from the Soviet and recent past. Ruthless truth and folk mythology form a brilliant alloy and explosive mixture.

Blue Lard is an act of desecration. Blue Lard is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to...

Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Thanks to the lukewarm war of sporadic violence and constant propaganda that has been dragging on for years, only two residents remain: retired safety inspector turned beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich and Pashka, a rival from his schooldays. With little food and...

The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad is set mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z - an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several embedded narratives attributed to an alcoholic chemist-turned-massage therapist give insight into the funny, ironic, or tragic lives of people who remained in...

The story of a Ukrainian-Jewish family in Kyiv is at the center of Alexei Nikitin's new novel ‘From the Faces of Fire’. Ilya Goldinov is a boxer, from Dynamo, champion of Ukraine in heavyweight. In the first months of the war, Ilya commanded a platoon of a partisan regiment, later fought as part of an infantry division of the Red Army, was captured, and found an opportunity to escape. In...

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes,...

A sad novel full of humor. A guard at a prison camp is writing about his everyday life. The prison camp seems to be a little model of the 'freedom': there's also love, hatred, happiness, sadness - just mixed in a different way, but in the same proportions. After a moment the 'Zone' starts to remind the Soviet state...

In this issue: Vassili Grossman The Commissar, Leonid Latynin Stavr and Sarah, Nina Sadur Irons and Diamonds, Ludmila Ulitskaia March 1953, Barely Soup, Igor Pomerantsev Sobs in Corners, A Little About You, Yosip, Victor Beilis Breakfast Alfresco. Stories united under subtitle What It Means To Be A Jew In Russia: Lev Anninsky The Wandering Jew, Osip Mandelstam Mikhoels, Larissa Miller Home...

of several generations of an upper-class family during the First World War and the Civil War in Russia. Historical events, providing a background for the narrative, are depicted not directly but rather as seismic shock waves overturning and transforming the lives of ordinary people. Lala, Natasha, Toma - three heroines are close friends, all from formerly affluent families stripped of their...