The Canadian North is a vast and lonely land where bears roam free, fires rage unchecked, and storms blast every living thing on the tundra. When Stephan Kesting, already no stranger to pushing his own physical limits, was faced with a rare illness, he knew the only way for him to recover in both body and mind was to dig even deeper. Despite the dangers inherent in the sub-arctic, Kesting sets...

The mystical laundress at the center of this novel is obsessed with purity. Her task is formidable as she stands guard over a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coal mine that hides terrible truths. The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes. Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin...

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the 4 horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it...

Journey to Ukraine (level B1) is an intermediate textbook of Ukrainian language for students who know Russian. Vocabulary and explanations are presented in Russian and Ukrainian. The book consists of 15 units covering a wide range of lexical and cultural topics. The course is designed for an average of 80-120 hours of classroom instruction. QR-codes with links to the appropriate audio...

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences,...

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and...

In 1961, overnight a concrete border went up, dividing the city of Berlin into two parts - East and West. The story of the Berlin Wall holds up a mirror to post-WWII politics and the Cold War Era when the United States and the USSR were enemies, always on the verge of war. The wall meant that no one from Communist East Berlin could travel to West Berlin, a free, democratic area. Of course that...

Strange, almost magical, things are afoot in Lviv. Seagulls circle overhead while the passing breeze carries a briny whiff, even though the coast is far away. A ragtag group of aging hippies gather around a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery. Among them are an ex-KGB officer and the old subversive he once spied upon. Soon, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych band together to uncover the...

The protagonists of Andris Kurprišs’s debut collection are at times melancholy and worrisome, and world-angry or absurdist at others. Kuprišs plays with tension, a building up to climaxes reminiscent of Henry James—but with endings that leave a lingering sense of having missed some important detail, some sinister clue that will reveal all meaning. Deceptively simple, nostalgic, and resigned,...

On a December morning in 1907, two close friends, Hanna and Zakariya, return to their village near Aleppo after a night of drunken carousing in the city, only to discover that there has been a massive flood. Their neighbors, families, children-nearly all of them are dead. Their homes, shops, and places of worship are leveled. Their lives will never be the same.

Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her by the German authorities during the War as part of Himmler's clandestine 'Lebensborn' project, which strove for a 'racially pure' Germany.