An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author's boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter's family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter's main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation...

Three by Tsvetaeva collects three dazzling and devastating reckonings with love and the end of love by a poet celebrated for the unequaled verbal inventiveness and emotional intensity of her work. ‘Backstreets,’ translated into English for the first time, is a retelling of a Russian fairy tale that offers a witches’ brew of temptation, bodily transformation, marriage, and murder. ‘Poem of the...

Set in a world of its own, Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs is both a mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism. The narrator of the book and his brother, Otho, live in an ancient house carved out of the great marble cliffs that overlook the Marina, a great and beautiful lake that is surrounded by a peaceable land of ancient cities and temples and flourishing...

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under...

To my mind Maria Matios’ Sweet Darusya is the best contemporary Ukrainian novel written since Ukrainian Independence in 1991. It reveals a family saga that is much more dynamic than classical sagas and at the same time is much more touching and engaging. It is an emotional history of Ukraine with a very well researched and vivid historical background that gives the reader the opportunity to...

An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a...

A searing portrayal of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an ‘artistic dinner’ hosted by a composer and his society wife—a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent...

This book is the first fundamental collection of documents and testimonies concerning domestic cinema during the Great Patriotic War. Many aspects of film history are revealed within it for the first time, and with a completeness never before witnessed.

A monumental new translation—the first in more than twenty years—of Russia’s greatest family drama, rendered with all the passion, humor, and soul of the original.

The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: ‘I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common...

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and...

In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. Written in rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.